Improving Dragon Age: Inquisition?

Bailos

The Apostate
Sep 26, 2009
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Hello all!

I've seen a few threads and comments here and at other gaming websites trashing Dragon Age Inquisition, calling it the worst, etc. One was about features from an earlier tech demo, and most features seemed to have been cut in the final game, and butts were hurt all around.

Personally, I love Inquisition. I'm halfway through my second playthrough, trying to find everything and really going slowly this time. I understand the criticisms of it feeling like an offline MMO, but honestly anytime I've played an MMO I've wished I could play without all those damn people getting in the way.

Anywho, I'd like to ask what people, particularly those who are disappointed in the game, wanted from this? And are there any games that have these features or mechanics you feel would vastly improve the game?
 

Indecipherable

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Mar 21, 2010
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I believe it's better on console but for PCs the controls are sloppy and combat is pretty awful. It doesn't quite know whether it is an action RPG or a tactical RPG and straddles the line between both. Dragon Age 2 is poorly regarded by many but its tactical pausing and gameplay are better than the muddled approach DA:I has.

To add to that there is, as you pointed out, a huge amount of filler content which I find appeals to the obsessive compulsive types. I'd rather just experience the story and gameplay and not worry about collecting some stupid amount of shards from every zone.
 

Saetha

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I really liked the game, to be honest. It was my understanding that most people did - has it not been well-received?

Anyway, my biggest complaint with the game would probably be there's too much filler. Main quest itself is ridiculously short, especially in comparison to past games in the series. I feel like they put too much focus on the open-world aspect. And I mean, I liked the open-world aspect, I love sandbox RPGs - but that's not what I go to BioWare for, y'know? I go to them for story and character, and I feel like they got less attention this time around so the game could ape Skyrim. I felt like I barely got to know my companions before they were declaring me their greatest friend and confidant. Dorian, for instance - after one conversation I got his personal quest, so I went and did that, and afterwards he was all like "You have been a true friend to me." And I'm just sitting here going "Bro, I've never even taken you out of Skyhold. Seriously, I think I've said, like, twenty words to you. Total. In all of time. How am I your best friend?" It was a little easier for companions I talked to a lot or put in my party, but given how that only applied to about half of them, it felt kinda weird for all the rest.

I would've preferred a game with some of the content cut out - Forbidden Oasis, for instance, and like half of the Hinterlands could've been removed - and instead replaced with more plot and more character. They could've extended the time travel bit in Redcliffe, for instance - that was a really neat quest, and I actually found myself wondering what had happened to the companions I didn't take with me. I would've infinitely preferred an expansion on that over the Temple of Collection Side Quests. They could've upgraded the Hissing Wastes ruins to a main quest, giving us more depth and knowledge of ancient Dwarven society, as well as a plot where Varric was front and center. They could've expanded on the idea of storming castles and capturing holds, giving all three some level of attention and intrigue. They could've added more in-depth personal quests for the companions, giving us a better look into who they were. Or they could've given more screentime to Corypheus, or the Sentinel elves, or Flemeth.

I mean, I liked what we got, but I can see so much more was wasted in favor of things like collecting shards and killing dragons. It irks me.
 

The Madman

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-Less junk quests, more meaningful interactions.

My main problem with Inquisition is that 90% of the content is just there as busywork. Meaningless little MMO style fetch quests where you're off collecting X of Y or killing so and so because this guy said so. There are annoyingly few side-quests in Inquisition that felt like they actually mattered, a shame because DA:Origins was pretty good in that regard in terms of giving side-quests that had their own little mini-story and multiple resolutions. Meanwhile even what few side-quests did feel like they were trying something different were often entirely linear and required zero player choice or consequence save to accomplish a laundry list of objectives till someone told you that you'd finished.

Personally I'd have preferred a smaller world or less quests if it meant the areas and quests that were present actually felt like they mattered and required actual thought on the players part.

-Consequences that actually matter and real resolution.

In terms of the overarching story and the decisions you make along the way a lot of it really felt pointless by the end. Supposedly big choices that often just came down to a slight number difference every here or there while frankly the games conclusion left a lot to be desired and might as well have had a 'Insert Future DLC Here' sign plastered across it. The main villain turned out to be a joke and... well... it just sort of ended after that. No epilogues for the characters or places you'd visited, just a brief little bit of text followed by a return to your keep so that you can continue any side-quests you might have missed. That was it.

Some of the smaller character storyline had some neat ways to go about them and for that I applaud Bioware, but overall very little really felt like it amounted to much by the games end, which was obviously disappointing.

-No big memorable moment.

Kotor has the big Revan reveal, Jade Empire has the betrayal, Baldur's Gate 2 has the asylum, Mass Effect has the talk with Sovereign, etc, etc. Bioware are known for having a big set-piece moment in their games that solidify the plot and are meant to propel the stories intensity forward and build towards a more dramatic finale. Inquisition kinda didn't. There were some neat moments but when I look back at the game in retrospect there were almost no big wow moments, no plot twists I hadn't seen coming a mile away, nothing to drive the intensity towards the end of the story. In fact the story just kind of falls apart at the end, it felt downright anti-climactic with almost no build-up and little to really remember about it.

There was the fall of Haven which I think was meant to be one of those kinds of moments and which was very cool, but that's only like 1/4 of the way into the game, that scene can hardly carry the rest of the main story and it's not like it revealed anything dramatic we didn't already know or anything save move the main base from Haven to Skyhold. Maybe the siege on the Warden stronghold? Except the main villain wasn't even present for that and it felt more like a side-quest than anything. I barely even remember why the player was there, the baddie was mind controlling the Wardens and you had to stop them because they were summoning demons? Again, it felt more like a very cool side-quest than a big moment, despite the somewhat arbitrary and pointless 'sacrifice' near the end obviously meant to insert drama.

Meanwhile the ending wasn't Mass Effect 3 bad but it wasn't really good either. Just sorta meh. A meh conclusion to a decent game.

-The loot sucked.

So you've managed to kill a mighty dragon, what does he drop? Some gear worse than the crafted stuff you're already using and the scales for a new set of crafted gear. Yay? I remember back in the days of Baldur's Gate where if you killed a dragon you could be damned sure you'd be getting something epic out of it aside from some scales, which you'd also get. This whole MMO style loot system kinda kills the thrill of finding another Crom Faeyr or Carsomyr instead of just some random blue or purple item with mediocre stats.
 

sanquin

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The randomized loot sucks. And to be honest, it just feels lazy in DA:I. Like they just didn't want to put the effort into a slightly more specific loot system with less things to loot if needed. I don't want to defeat a big baddie (not a necessarily a boss), only to find out that the guy or the chest behind him only dropped stuff I'll be selling to a vendor, then repeating that same scenario dozens of times to maybe possibly find an item you can use. Except that by that point, you are usually already able to make something better with crafting.

While I think some parts of the main storyline were memorable, even if they were just basic fantasy plot, the vast majority of quests aren't interesting in the slightest. I think I would have preferred half the side quests, but with better plot. I still really like all the side quests though. I like doing all kinds of quests while exploring the land. Though I rarely return to a an area to do lower level quests.

That the game doesn't have 'real' choice with actual different consequences is fine by me. I just wish they would stop claiming that their game has real choice when it doesn't.

And lastly, the companion AI. It's even more stupid than enemy AI. At least I see enemy archers attempt to get some distance if you charge them. I see mages teleport away when they get attacked. And I see tanks actually protect their team mates. My companions...mages and archers barely move when attacked in melee, if at all. And tanks mostly just attack the target they were assigned to. They don't even move out of AOE circles on the ground...I mean, really? =/ This is probably partly due to them dumbing down the tactics system so much.
 

Sniper Team 4

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There are two things that I feel could improve Inquisition. One is a more personal matter, so I'm not sure how many people are going to like it, but I see someone has already said my other thing, so I'll start with that:

The quests and overall story needed to be more focused. Okay, let's start with the overall story, as this is actually two separate things. Throughout the entire game, you are told over and over again who the main threat is. He is a figure from myth and legend, someone who is not supposed to be real, but since he is, that suddenly means that a lot more stuff is real too. The game kept teasing that there was going to be some big reveal about the origins of a lot of stuff in the Dragon Age world. Codex entries, conversations, implied nods--all of these things were building up to something. Maybe we would find out the true history of what really went down when the Fade was invaded, what the Darkspawn really are, and all sorts of little things that haven't been solved. But with this one villain, we were going to get our answers.
And then, late in the game, the story takes a sharp left turn. So sharp in fact that the main villain suddenly feels like he is no longer important. It feels like the characters just go, "Oh, we better go take care of him before we forget." Or maybe that's how I feel, because the reveals toward the end--especially that scene after the credits--raised more questions than answers. It seemed like the writers suddenly wanted to tell a different story and thus cut all ties with the original one, but they still needed you to kill the boss so they went, "Well, here you go."
As for the side quests, none of them felt like they mattered or had any closure. I've brought up the hunter quest that you get in snowy mining town. You get a note that says a hunter is tracking something. You follow the path, find his body, and find a note that says, "Leave me alone or I swear I'll kill you!" that has been ripped up and then pieced back together. And that's it. Um...okay. What just happened? What was that all about? So many quests in the game feel like that. They just end without any sort of resolution.

My other thing, and this is the personal one, is that I want my Merrill, Liara, Leliana, Tali character back. I want the shy, nerdy, cute girl back. Yes, I know they are a walk stereotype, but pretty much all Dragon Age characters are. And yet for some reason, they cute this character type out. Sera has her moments, but she's more like Jack. A jerk with an eye for trouble with a soft heart who is just lonely.
 

idon'tknowaboutthat

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One word: combat. It feels so lifeless in DAI. I love DAO to pieces, was super pumped about DAI, and I only got about 5 hours into it before I quit, never finished even the second area. The combat is so boring and non-strategical now, all you do is hold the attack button and use abilities whenever they're off cooldown. There's no party member tactics, no real need for tanking and threat management and all that. (Okay maybe on the highest difficulty, never played that.) In DAO you really had to plan out attacks even on normal difficulties, and coordinate you party - in DAI, I can just spam attacks with one character and leave the others on autopilot, and the fights resolve themselves - it's boring.

Like I said, never got far into the plot, dunno if it's any good, but regardless the game is boring to play. Also the loot and inventory system kinda sucks, seems like all it is is getting higher and higher DPS weapons.
 

Gizmo1990

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Most of mine have been said but I would like to include actually fixing all the broken passives and abilities. Biowear have said to be patient but 4 months in and core combat stuff still dosen't work. That is simply ridiculous.
 

Amaror

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Pretty much what The Madmen said.
On top of that a lot of the smaller features they added are just not very good and don't work together all that well:

Crafting

Crafting was a neat idea and the basic system isn't too bad but it's all just soooooo tedious. Gathering materials is about the most tedious thing ever because you get so little each time and you manually have to run there and it's just tedious all around. The crafting itself is also needlessly tedious. Want to make a nice new sword? Go to the weapon crafter, scroll all the way to the one weapon you want to craft and craft it, then tediously scroll through dozens and dozens of shematics to find the upgrades you want to get and craft them too, then go all the way to ANOTHER crafting station to apply the upgrades. For F***s sake just let me have armor weapons in the same station with a niceand clear interface were i can craft weapons and directly craft and apply the upgrades for them. Additionally crafting makes loot so stupid because nothing you find is better than what you can craft. It's just so stupid.

War Table

Again a somewhat neat idea, but executed as boring and tedious as it can possibly be. Given the fact that this should feel like your doing these grand things of forging powerfull alliances, marching your armies across the world and secretly bringing down the power of anyone that opposes you it doesn't feel that way because there's basically no reason to do any of it. The rewards for these missions are pityfull and barely worth mentioning. I did tons and tons of these missions and the only worthwhile thing i ever got out of it was the staff of this ancient native warlord or something. That is of course until i just crafted a way more powerfull one an hour later. Legendary weapon? Pa, my smith can do better than that! After the mission itself took one whole DAY.
On top of that it's just so tedious. So i start the missions and go adventuring in one of the open world regions. After about 15 minutes most missions are done and i want to start new ones. I have to go to an entire loading screen back to Heaven/Skyhold were it spawns me obviously as far away from the war table as possible, walk through basically the entire map for at least two minutes, wait through another loading screen and THEN i can set new missions. They couldn't have made it more tedious if they tried.

Menus

Oh those menus. Dreadfull, just dreadfull. They were nearly as horrible as skyrims menus, but at least skyrim came open for mods so we could fix that sh**. Frostbite engine isn't modable, so were stuck with these lazy, consoleport, horrible to control menus that are just so so so so freaking tedious to control.

And of course the things The Madmen mentioned.
Combat sucks, story sucks, sidequests suck, loot sucks.
None of these things are such a dealbreaker that they would make me stop playing a game but combined they are just killing the game.
We end up with a Rpg with bad combat, bad story, bad sidequests, bad loot, horrible controls and just a whole lot of tedium. That's not a fun game! Why should i play this game.
 

Danbo Jambo

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idon said:
One word: combat. It feels so lifeless in DAI. I love DAO to pieces, was super pumped about DAI, and I only got about 5 hours into it before I quit, never finished even the second area. The combat is so boring and non-strategical now, all you do is hold the attack button and use abilities whenever they're off cooldown. There's no party member tactics, no real need for tanking and threat management and all that. (Okay maybe on the highest difficulty, never played that.) In DAO you really had to plan out attacks even on normal difficulties, and coordinate you party - in DAI, I can just spam attacks with one character and leave the others on autopilot, and the fights resolve themselves - it's boring.

Like I said, never got far into the plot, dunno if it's any good, but regardless the game is boring to play. Also the loot and inventory system kinda sucks, seems like all it is is getting higher and higher DPS weapons.
ALL of this^.....

Saetha said:
There's too much filler. Main quest itself is ridiculously short, especially in comparison to past games in the series. I feel like they put too much focus on the open-world aspect. And I mean, I liked the open-world aspect, I love sandbox RPGs - but that's not what I go to BioWare for, y'know? I go to them for story and character, and I feel like they got less attention this time around so the game could ape Skyrim. I felt like I barely got to know my companions before they were declaring me their greatest friend and confidant.
....this too^.....

The Madman said:
-Less junk quests, more meaningful interactions.

My main problem with Inquisition is that 90% of the content is just there as busywork. Meaningless little MMO style fetch quests where you're off collecting X of Y or killing so and so because this guy said so. There are annoyingly few side-quests in Inquisition that felt like they actually mattered, a shame because DA:Origins was pretty good in that regard in terms of giving side-quests that had their own little mini-story and multiple resolutions. Meanwhile even what few side-quests did feel like they were trying something different were often entirely linear and required zero player choice or consequence save to accomplish a laundry list of objectives till someone told you that you'd finished.

Personally I'd have preferred a smaller world or less quests if it meant the areas and quests that were present actually felt like they mattered and required actual thought on the players part.

-Consequences that actually matter and real resolution.

In terms of the overarching story and the decisions you make along the way a lot of it really felt pointless by the end. Supposedly big choices that often just came down to a slight number difference every here or there while frankly the games conclusion left a lot to be desired and might as well have had a 'Insert Future DLC Here' sign plastered across it. The main villain turned out to be a joke and... well... it just sort of ended after that. No epilogues for the characters or places you'd visited, just a brief little bit of text followed by a return to your keep so that you can continue any side-quests you might have missed. That was it.

Some of the smaller character storyline had some neat ways to go about them and for that I applaud Bioware, but overall very little really felt like it amounted to much by the games end, which was obviously disappointing.

-No big memorable moment.

Kotor has the big Revan reveal, Jade Empire has the betrayal, Baldur's Gate 2 has the asylum, Mass Effect has the talk with Sovereign, etc, etc. Bioware are known for having a big set-piece moment in their games that solidify the plot and are meant to propel the stories intensity forward and build towards a more dramatic finale. Inquisition kinda didn't. There were some neat moments but when I look back at the game in retrospect there were almost no big wow moments, no plot twists I hadn't seen coming a mile away, nothing to drive the intensity towards the end of the story. In fact the story just kind of falls apart at the end, it felt downright anti-climactic with almost no build-up and little to really remember about it.

There was the fall of Haven which I think was meant to be one of those kinds of moments and which was very cool, but that's only like 1/4 of the way into the game, that scene can hardly carry the rest of the main story and it's not like it revealed anything dramatic we didn't already know or anything save move the main base from Haven to Skyhold. Maybe the siege on the Warden stronghold? Except the main villain wasn't even present for that and it felt more like a side-quest than anything. I barely even remember why the player was there, the baddie was mind controlling the Wardens and you had to stop them because they were summoning demons? Again, it felt more like a very cool side-quest than a big moment, despite the somewhat arbitrary and pointless 'sacrifice' near the end obviously meant to insert drama.

Meanwhile the ending wasn't Mass Effect 3 bad but it wasn't really good either. Just sorta meh. A meh conclusion to a decent game.

-The loot sucked.

So you've managed to kill a mighty dragon, what does he drop? Some gear worse than the crafted stuff you're already using and the scales for a new set of crafted gear. Yay? I remember back in the days of Baldur's Gate where if you killed a dragon you could be damned sure you'd be getting something epic out of it aside from some scales, which you'd also get. This whole MMO style loot system kinda kills the thrill of finding another Crom Faeyr or Carsomyr instead of just some random blue or purple item with mediocre stats.
.......with these complaints too^.

DA:I feels "meh" and bland. It's not awful, by no means, but I don't feeled compelled to play it one bit. The Dragon Age series has gone being from something which gripped you from start to finish, andw hich you'd be counting the hours down at work to get home and play, to something you put on for 15-20 min to kill time whilst waiting for your tea to cook.

How to improve it? Just make a PROPER sequel to Dragon Age: Origins. All that's needed is to update the graphics, include area effect attacks for Warriors, and have a new plot. The rest of it was pretty perfect and Bioware have massively mistaken evolution for devolution.
 

SlumlordThanatos

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1) Better characters.

I'm not sure if it was simple bad writing or a desire to please someone, but the playable characters (Varric doesn't count, he's an immigrant) are either forgettable or annoying. Bioware has written far better characters in the past, I'm not sure what happened to them here.

2) Faster-paced combat.

I might be in the minority of people who liked the direction that DA 2 took with the combat, and I was hoping Inquisition would build on that foundation. I was sorely mistaken, and combat feels like a slog.

3) Balancing combat.

There's no reason to play anything besides a Knight-Enchanter mage; with the right talents, you're effectively invincible and can easily solo most encounters. No reliable healing was a huge mistake, given how squishy your melee fighters are and how difficult it is for the tank to manage threat.

4) Inventory management and lewtz.

Far too much of the game was spent managing my inventory, wondering if any of the 50-odd pieces of equipment I picked up were any good. Almost all of the time, they weren't. Diablo III while in the heyday of the RMAH had more consistent loot drops than this, it's ridiculous.
 

Zenn3k

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Its fine, its fun, its a bit heavy on the story at times (almost too much), but its a fine game with a lot of work put into it ,that much is clear.

I haven't beat it, might not ever do so as I became bored, mostly because the romance shit took too long, I wanna get with the Elf girl already! Girl on girl action! Wtf?"You're nice, we should travel more"?5 hours of questing later?'You're nice, we should travel more"?k, how about I just turn the game off instead?

The combat is mostly trivial, spam abilities until everything dies, drink a shit-load of potions because this game lacks an actual HEALING class.
 

laggyteabag

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Tactical camera. Why on earth can it be obstructed by scenery? It just makes no sense. It was just so clunky to use that I think I only ever really used it in boss fights to split up my companions. I don't think that I ever used it in a normal fight. What was wrong with the DA:O system? That seemed like the most intuitive and useful iteration of this camera, so why needlessly change it?

The loot. I think that crafting is part of the problem here. Sure, it can be avoided by simply saying "just dont craft anything", but when you can craft something that is leagues better than what you can loot, you have a problem. I also found that most of the armour looks the same, just with a few extra scales here, or a cloak there. Unless you are using one of the more unique armours, such as the Grey Warden gear, you mostly looked the same no matter what class you were. I kinda wish that there was some more variety in the armours, or if you could use some of the companion's styles.

The War Table. This thing has so many problems. You send agents on missions, and then you wait X amount of time for them to be completed. This is usually the kind of thing that you would find in a companion app. This could have been improved in two ways:
1) Actually have some input other than "send agent to do X". What if you actually went to deal with these bandits, or what if you actually spoke with some of these nobles or characters. It would have allowed so much more interaction with the world or with some characters from previous games. I would've loved to speak to Aveline, King Alistair or The Hero of Ferelden, but instead I got to read a wall of text.
2) Give some decent loot. Great, I sent this group of people on a six hour mission, and I got a terrible weapon and about 100 gold. What a great use of time for me and for the Inquisition. Hell, I contacted the Hero of Ferelden from the first game, and I got a letter and a fucking belt.

Too many resource nodes. This is one of those times where I feel like more is less. When I played DA:I, I can say with certainty that I spent most of my time running around and collecting resources, and it isn't fun, but I feel like I have to do it to be efficient. It would have been so much better if the resource nodes were fewer and further between, but you got more of a material for collecting it. It just feels like ME2's resource collection otherwise. Grinding for mats and doing busywork is just not fun to me. Also, fuck the shards.

Stripping away micromanagement. One step forward, two steps back. We got armour customisation back for companions, and that is great (not that it should have been taken away anyway), but why did they remove the point allocation and gut the tactics? Sure, not all players want to micromanage their characters, but that is what the "auto-level" button is for, and in previous games, the AI did a pretty good job at using their skills. If I want to control what my companions wear, how they level up, and how/when they use their skills, let me. Automatic point allocation and "use skill Y/N" is not enough.

Pointless zones. Inquisition has 13 zones; three are hubs, one of which gets removed, leaving 10 leveling zones. Of those 10 leveling zones, only 3 (three!) are used for the main quest[footnote]There are also some other "side" locations used for the main quest, like the Arbor Wilds, Theirinfal Redoubt and The Fade, but they are relatively small compared to the other locations in the game, and they cannot be revisited. They are more like "levels" than "locations".[/footnote], leaving 7 to be used entirely for the side quests (with one being used for that pointless shard adventure), and a few of those 7 for companion recruitment. Of those sidequests, none ever really feel like they have an impact, and many end up being "kill X" or "find X". There was one notable instance of a quest in which I walked into this random woman's house, and without any form of introduction, greeting or "get out of my house", she starts telling me this really personal story about how her husband was killed by Templars, and without her asking me to do anything about it, and without me even getting the chance to offer to help, I go on my way and the game expects me to do something about her husband's death. I wasn't even the Inquisitor yet, so for all she knew, I was just some random person who walked into her house with a bunch of weapons, and she starts telling me a story.

Have previous choices matter. You look at the Dragon Age Keep, and I expected to have every single one of those choices reflected in Inquistion. In reality, I can recall only a handful of instances of "oh yeah, I remember that choice.". Where were all of the returning characters? That is what I missed the most. You don't have a huge cast of companions from previous games and then only give some of them a passing mention.

You may think that I hate Inquisition from all of that, but I don't. I loved that game. This is pretty much tough love.
 

laggyteabag

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The Madman said:
-No big memorable moment.

Kotor has the big Revan reveal, Jade Empire has the betrayal, Baldur's Gate 2 has the asylum, Mass Effect has the talk with Sovereign, etc, etc. Bioware are known for having a big set-piece moment in their games that solidify the plot and are meant to propel the stories intensity forward and build towards a more dramatic finale. Inquisition kinda didn't. There were some neat moments but when I look back at the game in retrospect there were almost no big wow moments, no plot twists I hadn't seen coming a mile away, nothing to drive the intensity towards the end of the story. In fact the story just kind of falls apart at the end, it felt downright anti-climactic with almost no build-up and little to really remember about it.

There was the fall of Haven which I think was meant to be one of those kinds of moments and which was very cool, but that's only like 1/4 of the way into the game, that scene can hardly carry the rest of the main story and it's not like it revealed anything dramatic we didn't already know or anything save move the main base from Haven to Skyhold. Maybe the siege on the Warden stronghold? Except the main villain wasn't even present for that and it felt more like a side-quest than anything. I barely even remember why the player was there, the baddie was mind controlling the Wardens and you had to stop them because they were summoning demons? Again, it felt more like a very cool side-quest than a big moment, despite the somewhat arbitrary and pointless 'sacrifice' near the end obviously meant to insert drama.another Crom Faeyr or Carsomyr instead of just some random blue or purple item with mediocre stats.
Well, I have to disagree with you there. In the post-credits scene they reveal that Solas is actually an elven god in disguise (The Dread Wolf, the trickster god), and he was the one that gave the orb to Corypheus. It also showed him supposedly killing Flemeth, so I would count that as "the big moment of Inquisition". It is just a shame that they relegated this to the post-credits scene. This is an important plot-development, not a goddamn Marvel movie.
 

The Madman

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Laggyteabag said:
Well, I have to disagree with you there. In the post-credits scene they reveal that Solas is actually an elven god in disguise (The Dread Wolf, the trickster god), and he was the one that gave the orb to Corypheus. It also showed him supposedly killing Flemeth, so I would count that as "the big moment of Inquisition". It is just a shame that they relegated this to the post-credits scene. This is an important plot-development, not a goddamn Marvel movie.
That was a cool moment and all, but it's also part of why I mention the ending felt a bit like a big 'Incoming future DLC' sign as opposed to a proper conclusion. Had a twist like that been incorporated into the games plot and had it played a part in the story it could have been very memorable, but it wasn't, it was relegated to the videogame equivalent to a post-credits teaser and I'm not about to judge the quality of a game by a teaser it delivers for future projects.

In all fairness Bioware have made some very cool DLC in the past so maybe DA:I will feel more like a complete game in the future once it's had DLC to pad outs its story and provide a better conclusion, in fact I'd be willing to bet it will be, but again I can't judge a game now based on its potential for the future.
 

Darth Rosenberg

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All old points, but:

Combat - it's awful. Slow the pace down, put Tactics back in, and bring back the tac-pause feature from DA:O and DAII. Also put auto-attack back in, if you can't be arsed to make a proper hack'n'slasher.

Story - it's the story of the Inquisition, sure, but the antagonist is a banal, motivation-free non-entity who seems fairly shite at his Big Bad job. Just when the main plot got interesting - the game ended...

Less Filler - SP MMO says it all. Placing a marker on a map and running to it is NOT 'content' - it's all just bullshit if there's barely any context.

Storage - BioWare are just dopey for not having that as standard from the off.

Don't make schematics random loot - unless you use the chest farming exploit, getting a decent range of tier 3 schematics seems impossible. In the manner of Angry Joe: "No! Nnnno, BioWare!". The crafting system's a bit of a mess as it is, but making t3 schematics so hard to obtain is just a terrible design decision that arbitrarily punishes or rewards different players. There's barely enough armour designs as it is, which compounds the flaw.

There are about a billion other gripes with DA:I, which is now officially my Least Favourite BioWare Game Evah, but those are some of the obvious biggies. I enjoyed DA:I, I really did - and will play it again. But for the first time I don't really care about another DA if this is the direction they're headed, and I'm much more interested in finding out more about the next Mass Effect.


Danbo Jambo said:
The rest of it was pretty perfect and Bioware have massively mistaken evolution for devolution.
Perhaps, but for BioWare and EA, "devolution" = a mountain of shiny gold to fill their coffers. Who gives a stuff about good design or a truly finished, polished product, when your latest version of an IP becomes your best performing launch?

Cynical, I know, but - and maybe I'm still fanboyishly bitter - for me it's exactly what Bethesda did after Morrowind; get swayed by mainstream popularity and the money that comes with it.
 

babinro

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Sep 24, 2010
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I haven't even gotten out of the hinterlands so I'm fully aware the game still has a lot of mechanics I've not yet seen. That said, DA:I failed for me because of a lack of personal investment in the characters, the plot, and the side quests.

The combat was immediately less interesting than that of DA2 and the horrible PC interface made the tactical aspect of combat a chore. With only a 'meh' combat system the game needs to offer something more to keep me wanting to play. Unfortunately, the lack of focus just left me with so much to do I felt directionless.

For DA:I to work...I'd need it to be a completely different game. Have the scope and focus of DA2 with the combat of DA2. Let people really get invested in a plot and tie quests into the overall goal so they don't feel random. Stop overwhelming the players with option...I don't need to open up 5 potential quests in the middle of trying to solve one. I don't want to be picking flowers and crap off the ground every 10 steps for my entire play time. I get that these things are optional but it's hard to ignore 'shiny things' in games. You want to accomplish everything and in doing so you lose all investment in the story. Might as well just have a map with 100 x's on it and I just kill each mob at that location cause of 'reasons'.

I'm rambling. As I said, others can explain it better.

This is a case of quantity over quality without the heart.
 

Gennadios

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Aug 19, 2009
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I bought the game on a holiday sale, wasn't super enthused in the early game (slow start,) but really developed a fondness of the story as the thing went on. Definitely a return to form for EAWare. Hadn't beaten it yet but mostly due to a lack of time to invest.

The combat system is pretty much the weakest part IMO. Skill variety isn't great, melee just isn't fun (especially for the Knight-Enchanter class that I made the mistake of committing to) and the skill effects just feel inadequate in the higher difficulties. It's definitely not hardmode balanced, Instead of being a challenge combat is just a slog.

The maps felt a bit too large for the amount of fun that they held, maybe the fact that I played on Nightmare difficulty had alot to do with it. Them being smaller probably wouldn't have hurt the game, though.

I don't agree with the consensus that the villain is ineffective. Playing a mage, the game did a decent job of showing the political and popular opinion stacked agains you that the villain was just a small side story.

Overall I'm satisfied for my $40.

EDIT: Also, the War Table is pretty half-baked. It should have used Power Points and completed instantly. I was drowning in fucking power points and had to wait days for plot relevant missions to complete, kind of stupid.