Holy fucking fuck what the fuck were those fuckers fucking thinking?
Yeah, yeah. I'm late to the party. I've always been more of a Mass Effect guy. Dragon Age just felt like Fantasy Game: The Game. Adequate at best and completely lacking in identity. So I didn't bother with Inquisition until relatively recently when I saw the complete edition going for $20.
And it's kinda shit.
I mean, it's not all bad. For the first time Bioware have managed to make a world that feels somewhat alive and lived in. There's some fun characters and the voice acting is top-notch. The plot is, uhh... actually, y'know, the plot is a bit shit too. At least so far. Oh look, it's an Ancient Evil! What a fucking shock. And what's this, I've been recruited into an elite militant order with no oversight which constitutes the world's only hope of salvation? You don't say!
But the big issue, the big red infected pimple festering away right on the game's nose, is the... well, I suppose you'd call it the 'content'. Endless trudging through large open levels gathering 15/25 medicinal flowers, collecting 7/18 crystal shards and killing 2/3 rogue templars. Every time some spark of interest or creativity manages to surface it's immediately buried beneath a fucking avalanche of this low-effort filler garbage. All so they could claim that their game is "big" with "100s of hours of content". What's more, you can't even skip it. The game gates progression in the main missions behind score quotas that are filled by performing the side mission busywork bullshit.
This shit is making me retroactively appreciate The Witcher 3 more, which is a bizarre feeling.
It also shares an issue with that game in that the combat is nowhere near meaty enough to sustain a game this bloody long. Hacking your way through one lot of red health bars isn't notably different to hacking your way through another. Plus the controls are a bit shit. Not intolerably so, but it's a bit of a piss-off considering that the previous games, for all their faults, controlled fine.
The infamous Bioware Face phenomenon is back in full force. I found it bearable in previous games but the switch to the frostbite engine and the more detailed and textured faces just makes it stand out all the more. I realize that the use of dialogue trees prevents them from motion-capturing entire conversations a la Naughty Dog, but the end result is still an eyesore.
It's left me very apprehensive of Andromeda. People were praising this crap when it came out. Knowing Bioware and their responsiveness to feedback I won't be surprised if they add all this single-player-MMO collect-a-thon timesink bullshit to that game too. We already know it's going to be open-world to some degree. Christ.
I'm counting this as more evidence that open world games mostly need to fuck right off. This shit is worse than the modern military shooter plague, at least that crap only affected one or two genres. Bloody Skyrim seems to have infected the whole damn industry with its shallow, diluted mediocrity.
Bleh.
Yeah, yeah. I'm late to the party. I've always been more of a Mass Effect guy. Dragon Age just felt like Fantasy Game: The Game. Adequate at best and completely lacking in identity. So I didn't bother with Inquisition until relatively recently when I saw the complete edition going for $20.
And it's kinda shit.
I mean, it's not all bad. For the first time Bioware have managed to make a world that feels somewhat alive and lived in. There's some fun characters and the voice acting is top-notch. The plot is, uhh... actually, y'know, the plot is a bit shit too. At least so far. Oh look, it's an Ancient Evil! What a fucking shock. And what's this, I've been recruited into an elite militant order with no oversight which constitutes the world's only hope of salvation? You don't say!
But the big issue, the big red infected pimple festering away right on the game's nose, is the... well, I suppose you'd call it the 'content'. Endless trudging through large open levels gathering 15/25 medicinal flowers, collecting 7/18 crystal shards and killing 2/3 rogue templars. Every time some spark of interest or creativity manages to surface it's immediately buried beneath a fucking avalanche of this low-effort filler garbage. All so they could claim that their game is "big" with "100s of hours of content". What's more, you can't even skip it. The game gates progression in the main missions behind score quotas that are filled by performing the side mission busywork bullshit.
This shit is making me retroactively appreciate The Witcher 3 more, which is a bizarre feeling.
It also shares an issue with that game in that the combat is nowhere near meaty enough to sustain a game this bloody long. Hacking your way through one lot of red health bars isn't notably different to hacking your way through another. Plus the controls are a bit shit. Not intolerably so, but it's a bit of a piss-off considering that the previous games, for all their faults, controlled fine.
The infamous Bioware Face phenomenon is back in full force. I found it bearable in previous games but the switch to the frostbite engine and the more detailed and textured faces just makes it stand out all the more. I realize that the use of dialogue trees prevents them from motion-capturing entire conversations a la Naughty Dog, but the end result is still an eyesore.
It's left me very apprehensive of Andromeda. People were praising this crap when it came out. Knowing Bioware and their responsiveness to feedback I won't be surprised if they add all this single-player-MMO collect-a-thon timesink bullshit to that game too. We already know it's going to be open-world to some degree. Christ.
I'm counting this as more evidence that open world games mostly need to fuck right off. This shit is worse than the modern military shooter plague, at least that crap only affected one or two genres. Bloody Skyrim seems to have infected the whole damn industry with its shallow, diluted mediocrity.
Bleh.