IOwnTheSpire said:
Many here are not fond of Inquisition, which is interesting cause most of the reception I've heard has been quite positive.
Here's the thing... For every interesting thing Inquisition did right, Bioware fracked over fifty more things. Multiplayer? The mechanics themselves could be fun, but everything from balance to gear to even just unlocking classes was horribly borked. It grew repetitive by lvl 5 for your first character, and getting new armor, weapons and classes is so nestled in RNG that you'll need to have lightning strike three times in the same place, before you have a chance to potentially unlock a new class. Maps are bland, enemies even more so, and keepers and the barrier spells are so broken it trivializes everything.
And the story...? It's great! For the first quarter of the game. After Skyhold is reached though it's this tepid, weak attempt to try and out hype itself as it draws to a completely boring, uninteresting, unoriginal ending that has no respect for any of your choices. The worst of which is the post credit scene that COMPLETELY negates what would of been a drastic and life-altering detail for either your main character or another.
Then there are companions, which are about as weak as can be. The strong point is Varric. The weak point is there is zero companion quests that have a major turn or revelation. You get maybe one actual quest or interaction, then the rest is carried out through the war table. You don't get to learn or do much of anything with any character. Sera, for instance, has one thing where you go out and deal with her quest personally. The rest? War table missions where all you get is a brief mention of the chaos it caused (or didn't cause) and some approval. And the approval system itself is even weaker than ever. Bioware claimed to have removed it to make it more "realistic", but in all actuality it's a way to hide just how shallow it is to hit "full approval" and how deep it is to go near "full disapproval". From my experience, it takes almost nothing to cause characters to love you, while it takes lots of work in order to get them to hate you.
War table is bloody pathetic, plain and simple. I could write an essay on the various ways it was screwed up. Safe to say the game itself is only 10-15 hours max, with 90+ hours of meaningless, shallow F2P-Quality MMO quest filler. And war tables just add to that with meaningless time-limited mechanics.
But yes. A lot of the early reception was positive. Yet as time has passed people have soured as the game has had time to settle and sink in. The more time is spent, the more that gold paint wears off to expose murky, bland brown.
And what's worse? I'm seeing plenty of these issues likely rising up in ME4. Strike Teams? It's the war table, trading in guaranteed success but sometimes lengthy missions for RNG based success chances that will serve nothing more than a sink for resources for the player. It'll be a way to create an illusion of "careful choice and decision making". This whole "100s of planets" shtick reminds me of Mass Effect 1, which promised much the same but we saw the extent of the copy-paste Lego block level design that later reared its ugly head in Dragon Age 2. The claim of seamless travel moreso, because Inquisition has load times that puts pre-patch Bloodborne to shame. Now, I'm not saying it isn't impossible. MMOs like World of Warcraft load zones as you walk, creating the illusion of a seamless world. Yet that also required server architecture supporting each area, and while it might work for most of one continent, it's only for that continent. Loading is required to switch between them. And, quite obviously, Mass Effect 4 won't have the ability to do this considering it all has to be run off a single console and what information is on the disk.
That's not touching on the utterly bland choice of story presented, the fact that despite being a seemingly generic character we are locked to human, and this "raid" system sounds like a way to shoe-horn gear with stats or the like into the game along with something that could potentially end up being attached to micro transactions. Star Keys? Required to access special areas that don't sound to be necessary for main story progression? Yeah... I'm expecting to see a 5pack for ten dollars. I'll keep an eye on the game for sure... But mass effect 3 and Dragon age 2 (and Inquisition to a lesser extent), has made me wary of Biowares competence or ability to actually deliver a satisfying game in both gameplay and narrative. Hell... You still can't collect EVERYTHING in DA Inquisition I believe, since several mosaic pieces were last I heard still placed and glitched out of the level geometry and thus impossible to obtain.
