The weird combat of Dragon Age: Inquisition

[Casual Shinji]

The combat is fine, but take this as the word of a console peasant who played it mostly in an action-y way.

The only problem I had is that you can't set tactical guidelines for your companions. You can't set your archers to focus on other ranged attackers, or keep both them and your mages out of the thick of it. It was kind of annoying to see Varric and Sera shoot arrows from 3 feet away instead of keeping their distance, and then watch their health bar drop like a stone because they we're getting a face full of pummel.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

The only thing the tactical camera is good for is checking the weaknesses of the enemy, and being able to interact with Red Lyrium.

For everything else it is utterly useless.

Yep..pretty much this..I never use it. When I do go into Tactical View is from my own mistake because I zoom out too much. I really hope there would be an options to disable that or change the binding.

The combat is pretty abysmal compared to the previous two games. I don't like that camera at all..also why is there no information nameplates on the monsters and they only have it in tactical view? I hate that thing so much.

 

[Quellist]

Well crap, i was banking on Inquisition going back to the oldschool tactical combat style of Origins. Guess Inquistion is one i will be getting from the bargain bin in a years time now

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

It's okay. Like others said above the game is undeniably optimized and designed for consoles. The combat is okay I guess. Everyone else already mentioned the big problems(no autoattack, gutted tactics, bad camera).

/

For me it feels like it really wants to be a good RPG, and really it's pretty decent, but it's just so streamlined and gimped for consoles, so it can appeal better to a mainstream audience, that It just doesn't work well.

Well, there's a problem with that rationale. Whilst, yes, BioWare are clearly kicking the series down the flight of stairs labeled Console Sales/Exposure FTW, Inquisition's even dumber and more streamlined as a console experience... People cussed DAII, and whilst some of the criticism was fair, Inquisition's design is making a lot of those critics look back more fondly on its combat - which whilst by no means perfect, at least bothered to include proper Tactics as well as a patched in auto-attack.

So you can't really cite console influence as the main gripe, as DA's always been on console, and thus far it's never needed to be this stupid 'streamlined' before.

 

[Joccaren]

It's okay. Like others said above the game is undeniably optimized and designed for consoles. The combat is okay I guess. Everyone else already mentioned the big problems(no autoattack, gutted tactics, bad camera).

/

For me it feels like it really wants to be a good RPG, and really it's pretty decent, but it's just so streamlined and gimped for consoles, so it can appeal better to a mainstream audience, that It just doesn't work well.

Well, there's a problem with that rationale. Whilst, yes, BioWare are clearly kicking the series down the flight of stairs labeled Console Sales/Exposure FTW, Inquisition's even dumber and more streamlined as a console experience... People cussed DAII, and whilst some of the criticism was fair, Inquisition's design is making a lot of those critics look back more fondly on its combat - which whilst by no means perfect, at least bothered to include proper Tactics as well as a patched in auto-attack.

So you can't really cite console influence as the main gripe, as DA's always been on console, and thus far it's never needed to be this stupid 'streamlined' before.

To be fair, Bioware are planning to patch some stuff in [You mentioned patched in auto-attack for II, so I feel this is a valid point, even if auto-attack seems like it'd be nigh on impossible to patch in with this game's stupid system], and TBH I never really found DAIIs combat that tactical either. Just a lot of actiony gameplay, and when the game spammed ministun bosses at you, keeping your tank with the agro whilst healing him, and letting everyone else attack, which is so basic I struggle to actually call it tactics. Inquisition is the worst in the series, requiring you to do basically nothing but spam guard and barrier on your characters, and spam left click to kill, but it is thankfully not offensively terrible, and it does a lot of things right that II got wrong - i.e: Customisation, non-wave based combat, and not having every enemy ministun whilst spamming 10 of them at your party of 4 to stunlock you all.

For PC players, I think console influence IS the main gripe, as its what's made this game not enjoyable to its fullest. The combat is so so, but could be worked around to be somewhat enjoyable... if the game wasn't designed for consoles so the pause screen is impossible to do anything with. It'd also be nice if it was better optimised, and ran better, so that the prettiness wasn't tainted. I have to force my resolution down to play well, and I've got a pretty decent rig, even if it is getting old, let alone the cutscenes that look like old Zoetrope animations due to an FPS lock. So just slow, and constantly stoppy looking, and jarring compared to the rest of the game. On the plus side it included borderless window, and shortcut hotkeys, which games like ME2 forgot, but most of my issues with the game come from its consolitis. Its a good game, if more of a Skyrim sequel than an Origins sequel, but where most of its flaws lie is in its PC optimisation, which really is a shame.

 

[RavingSturm]

Good thing i didnt jump on this thing during launch. Been hearing about the gimped tactical view and mmo elements(like kill x things). The year of mostly disappointments continues...

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

To be fair, Bioware are planning to patch some stuff in [You mentioned patched in auto-attack for II, so I feel this is a valid point, even if auto-attack seems like it'd be nigh on impossible to patch in with this game's stupid system]

Is there any word on what, though? The only feedback I've seen mentioned was 'we're looking at stuff for PC'.

Re patching auto-attack: well, whilst I'd want it - and move-to-attack - in normal combat mode, I'd just about accept a pause/unpause option for the [half-arsed] Tac mode. I think that's a far easier persistent a-attack to add, given how Tac mode already functions.

...and TBH I never really found DAIIs combat that tactical either. Just a lot of actiony gameplay

True, and that's the 'it wasn't perfect' stuff I alluded to. Point is, whilst you barely needed those features, the player was allowed full control over how their companions behaved, which clearly DA:I lacks in any real sense. Whilst you rarely needed combined tactics in DAII, at least all of your companions would behave in a 100% predictable way, however you wished. Organised cross-class combo mayhem runs like clockwork in DAII. In DA:I, it's like a bunch of slightly unruly children or animals...

It'd also be nice if it was better optimised, and ran better, so that the prettiness wasn't tainted.

Well, if you want to feel better about things, check out some footage or screenshots on 360, the version I'm currently stuck with... To say it's an ugly mess is an understatement. No idea how much time and resources the last gen versions took, but I can't help feel the whole project would've benefited by simply ignoring 360 and PS3.

 

[zinho73]

Well,

I will have to add glitches to my combat system evaluation. I ran into some that were mostly funny (although annoying), like enemies clipping through the scenery and becoming invulnerable (it happens very quickly and they often leave by themselves) but yesterday when I was fighting a boss, I could not change characters (and won the fight anyway, kind of proving my point) and the animations on all character froze. At certain points the boss started to take damage and I could no even gauge what was causing it. I almost lost and it wasn't a fun experience at all.

For all the great things on the game, the combat system was executed in a rather incompetent way. It is sad, really, because the game is a success and I fear it might be an incentive for developers to keep giving us half-baked systems as long as the overall thing goes well.

 

[Riggsby101]

I'll qualify my imminent critical observations by saying that I use the real-time controls in combat instead of the tactical view (even though I play on PC), as I prefer the flow of the combat, and I do appreciate BioWare's attempt to create a real-time system that still involves thought and strategic/tactical thinking.

But why am I holding down the mouse button continuously? This feature removes the ability to use the mouse for anything else during combat, which is supposed to be the major advantage of PC over console, i.e. finer control. Even DA2 got that right, and in retrospect, may actually be the best realisation of this goal.

What I find strange is that they also removed the auto-move feature that DA:O and DA2 had, whereby your controlled character will automatically make their way to an item you've decided you want to interact with, e.g. a chest, NPC, etc.
This is a minor annoyance when you're gathering loot in a cleared room, but leads to infuriating, and embarrassing to look at, situations in combat where instead of moving towards your target (which would have partially excused the mouse hold requirement), your character just stabs at empty space.

At the end of the day, Dragon Age is the single player implementation of World of Warcraft mechanics, and I don't see why they felt the need to fix something that wasn't broken from the first two games. A tactical RPG should carry out the mundane tasks like attacking and moving for the player, so that they can concentrate on the actions requiring higher thought.

 

[RavingSturm]

I'll qualify my imminent critical observations by saying that I use the real-time controls in combat instead of the tactical view (even though I play on PC), as I prefer the flow of the combat, and I do appreciate BioWare's attempt to create a real-time system that still involves thought and strategic/tactical thinking.

But why am I holding down the mouse button continuously? This feature removes the ability to use the mouse for anything else during combat, which is supposed to be the major advantage of PC over console, i.e. finer control. Even DA2 got that right, and in retrospect, may actually be the best realisation of this goal.

What I find strange is that they also removed the auto-move feature that DA:O and DA2 had, whereby your controlled character will automatically make their way to an item you've decided you want to interact with, e.g. a chest, NPC, etc.
This is a minor annoyance when you're gathering loot in a cleared room, but leads to infuriating, and embarrassing to look at, situations in combat where instead of moving towards your target (which would have partially excused the mouse hold requirement), your character just stabs at empty space.

At the end of the day, Dragon Age is the single player implementation of World of Warcraft mechanics, and I don't see why they felt the need to fix something that wasn't broken from the first two games. A tactical RPG should carry out the mundane tasks like attacking and moving for the player, so that they can concentrate on the actions requiring higher thought.

I guess its not out of the realm of possibilty that they mightve or might be toying with the idea of a DA:mmo.

 

[semitope]

sorry to resurrect this but those saying the engine has this limitation are not right. This is a console thing that was simply left in. With how much money they likely spent on this game, its hard to imagine they really could not allow you to use the mouse, that you can already move around and point at enemies while the game is paused, to do the tactics. Why no edge scrolling etc? Its entirely down to who they made the game for. Then they sit there expecting us to pay for it and putting on stupid DRM because its sooo worth buying.

 

[Las7]

Will they patch it eventually? It's one of the main reasons I've not played or even contemplated buying it at this time. I understand why you would have these options in the console versions of the game but on PC it's just debilitating.
I know DA:I won't have MOD support, if it did this would have been resolved eventually by the community.

 

[Condiments7]

Will they patch it eventually? It's one of the main reasons I've not played or even contemplated buying it at this time. I understand why you would have these options in the console versions of the game but on PC it's just debilitating.
I know DA:I won't have MOD support, if it did this would have been resolved eventually by the community.

No patch or mod is going to save this game's combat as most of the problems are at a systemic level. I went in trying to like the game and give it a chance, but no Bioware offering has been this lackluster. As others of mentioned, the game emphasizes some of the worst parts of action and strategy combat. The tactical camera is serviceable at best, a downright chore at worst. You can't queue abilities to make use of tactical options outside of babying your characters by pausing every few seconds to do basic things, you can't select multiple characters at a time to issue out commands, the camera gets caught on everything and barely pans out and selecting a character's portrait will automatically shift your camera back to their position so you have to pan back to the battle-field EVERY SINGLE TIME. There is some awful ability lag that causes characters to wait multiple seconds before performing abilities, and AI will even over-write your commands if it feels the need. Telling a character to revive a downed teammate 3-4 times before they actually do it is not uncommon. Your attempts at positioning your melee behind enemies to avoid frontal AOE cones are often ignored as they shift spots constantly.

That isn't even going into the awful AI that just spams abilities making cross-combo abilities harder than it should be. If you have the audacity to turn off AI on certain abilities you then have to deal with the aforementioned terrible tactical camera. This would probably explain why the game is so under-tuned on modes like normal and hard, so the flaws aren't so apparent because you just stream-roll through everything.

If all these problems weren't bad enough, the enemy variety is so pathetic you'll be fighting the same types of enemies OVER AND OVER the many hours. These enemies also rarely have abilities that are threatening or force you to change your tactics, and are mostly just HP sponges. 95 percent of battles can be solved by throwing in your tank and AOE taunting, followed by spamming AOEs even on the hardest difficulty. When the game does try to get tricky like one of the bosses in the fade, it nearly made me quit the game altogether. By the end of the 70 hours of my first playthrough, I was so sick of the game I could barely finished it.

So yeah, they really screwed up this time. The next time I hear a reviewer say, "the combat is a nice mix of action combat with party controlled strategy", I'm not going to touch it with a ten foot pole.

 

[josemlopes]

The moment I played at a friends house and the character simply kept shooting arrows with auto aim and auto attack is said fuck it. What control do I have? Move the character? Because everything else was automated as fuck with the exception with the abilities.

Did no one played Dragons Dogma?

What kind of combat are they trying to have in this? I would understand if it was like in DA:O where it was more about comanding a party and giving orders but this one just looks like it tries to be an action game where you do the combat but you actually dont do shit.

 

[Steve Waltz]

95 percent of battles can be solved by throwing in your tank and AOE taunting, followed by spamming AOEs even on the hardest difficulty. When the game does try to get tricky like one of the bosses in the fade, it nearly made me quit the game altogether. By the end of the 70 hours of my first playthrough, I was so sick of the game I could barely finished it.

I?m confused. You complain how you use the same strategy over and over for every fight, and then, during one of the boss fights, your strategy doesn?t work and you feel like rage quitting the game?

I do agree that it?s tempting to use the same strategy for every fight. I constantly found myself casting Pull of the Abyss + Lightning Cage and sending in Blackwall for melee fighting while Vivienne, Sera and myself attacked from the sidelines and cast Barrier. It made quick work of most enemies on Nightmare difficulty (Especially after Blackwall became a Champion and started building guard). This even counts for The Nightmare boss in the fade. He could fly about, but still couldn?t get out of the cage or avoid being Weakened.

This didn?t work for the Grand Dutchess of Lydes and I actually had to adjust my strategy for once and it was a breath of fresh air. The Dutchess couldn?t be trapped by Lightning Cage, so I ended up casting it on the minions that were attacking Vivienne and the Inquisitior and moved the mages out of the cage. Then, as Sera, I used caltrops + poison cloud on them and just killed them all and continued focus on the Dutchess. I was doing this for The Nightmare as well, assuming that he couldn?t be affected by Lightning Cage, but when I found out that he COULD be trapped, I was able to drop him pretty easily.


It really is a nice mix of combat and party based strategy; you just don?t seem to have built a flexible enough team to adapt past one approach.


Honestly, my biggest issue with the combat was the aiming, but I can?t see much around that. As a mage, I needed to see the entire field to know who to trap with my AoE spells, who to attack with my staff, who to cast barrier on, and which jerk is hitting me with their dang arrows. With two mages I was able to control the entire field, but marksmen were absolutely brutal on nightmare and always put them on priority 1 for myself to kill, but I still needed to see what was going around on the rest of the field. The thing is, moving the camera around causes my target to change and that has caused problems in the past if I wasn?t paying too much attention. The lock-on system is fine if you?re focusing on one enemy, but when you have the responsibility of controlling the entire battlefield AND attacking the enemies, lock-on isn?t an option. And due to this, if I wasn?t paying close enough attention, I?d find that I?d been attacking a Rage Demon with a fire staff doing 1 damage per hit on him, while the marksman I thought I was hitting has forced Sera to use 2 potions while Vivienne and I are waiting for our Barrier cooldown to finish. So I come out of a skirmish against a group of lvl 11 Wraiths with 0 exp and -2 HP potions.

 

[DementedSheep]

I haven't played much yet and I'm using a controller so controlling my character is fine.

The thing I'm having trouble with at the moment is "hold position". Namely the fact that your companions seem ignore that a lot. I told you to hold position for a reason Varric! Why are you trying to kill demons with your face? The AI seems to override your commands sometimes which shouldn't be happening. I'm really missing the ability to select multiple companions at once and it sucks you can't switch weapons in combat. I don't really know why they made it so you can't. If I tell Solas to guard Cass or Blackwall he dose seem to keep casting barrier on them so at least that seems to be working and I don't have to screw around trying to do that manually.

With how big the areas are now it can be hard to get a good view of the whole battle field as well which is annoying and I keep accidentally switching targets (I don't want to lock on because I want to keep an eye on everyone else) but I might just need to get use to the controls a bit more.

Bioware has been getting worse with party control for a while now (although ME3 was better than 2 but it was still awful). I guess its because they are trying to add more action.

 

[small]

i like the game despite constant black screens and silent audio bugs but the combat and movement. its honestly like the PC controls were designed by someone who only uses a console who thinks thats what workable pc controls are.

while i have it installed at the moment it is going in the wait till the bugs are patched and the controls are fixed category for me, shame really i do enjoy it

 

[Condiments7]

95 percent of battles can be solved by throwing in your tank and AOE taunting, followed by spamming AOEs even on the hardest difficulty. When the game does try to get tricky like one of the bosses in the fade, it nearly made me quit the game altogether. By the end of the 70 hours of my first playthrough, I was so sick of the game I could barely finished it.

I?m confused. You complain how you use the same strategy over and over for every fight, and then, during one of the boss fights, your strategy doesn?t work and you feel like rage quitting the game?

The boss wasn't hard, just an ill designed piece of crap. It was the one fight that brings every problem with the combat into light in one cataclysmic moment. He has around 100k hp to slog through, turret spiders spawn non-stop, he sometimes decides to warp one-shot your back-line regardless of aggro management, and the terror demons at the end make micro-ing your backline even MORE annoying.

I beat it the first time by brute-forcing the encounter with barrier rotations like you can with all others but it was beyond tedious. If you're not watching him constantly for his queue when you goes to munch your back-line, one of your back-line will die instantly. Then you spend three or four times telling your other dude to revive them when they refuse your orders, while you have one of your dudes deal with the never-ending spiders. A whole lot of tedious micro-management for what amounts to nothing all that interesting or even tactical. It was the lackluster cap on an already underwhelming linear romp through the fade. Its like that place is doomed to horrible gameplay segments even though its probably the most interesting part of the world story-wise.

The hinterlands dragon is much better designed fight than that, but that still suffers from the basic issues mentioned in my post. Combat in games like jade empire and KOTOR were pretty underwhelming bioware affairs, but at least I felt I wasn't fighting the interface half as much as I do with this game. Its pretty awful a developer who was responsible for games like Mass Effect, and Baldur's Gate 2 gets so much wrong with the control scheme. Even the predecessors were far better than this!

They just need to drop the pretensions of trying to appeal to cRPG customers and go full out action. I'm also an action fan, so I'd probably appreciate it if it was good. Not this horrible hodgepodge...

 

[Atrocious Joystick]

The combat was fine at first. But it got boring pretty quick, to be fair every Dragon Age game has had that problem but I think Inquisition was probably the worst in that regard. They would have been much better off just going full action for the combat. Better to just say "fuck it" and make combat fast paced, challenging and fun and to hell with micromanaging rather than to try to strike some compromise. That way it might not feel like such a grind having to deal with the MMO inspired sandbox areas. Come up with a decent way to tell companions how to act during combat and you´d remove the need for micromanaging entirely, no need to bother with half assed tactical views then.

All in all it´s a good game but the empty and depressing areas combined with the boring combat really brings it down. Probably should have cut like half of the sandbox areas and focused on making "not paris" actually feel like a city and outfitting the remaining areas with some actual substance, like interesting side quests and such. Still, it is a point to the games favor that I still found myself slogging through that rather than just giving up.

 

[Silvver]

I hate it. During combat the NPC's drop like flies.

The only real way to win a battle is having the right level for your characters, no actual strategy. For example when fighting a dragon you can't tell NPC's to stand in a particular place. So ranged classes like mage or rogue with bow will stand right next to you for the fight; meaning they are brown bread pretty sharpish.

Unless i missed something obvious and am not taking full advantage of the combat utility.