Dragon Age : Inquisition thread of inquiry

[Positive Touch]

my computer is out of commission at the moment and it's three years old anyway. putting the 360 version on my Amazon wishlist tho 

[Great Rumbler]

I really didn't think that Bioware would be able to pull this one off, but they clearly went all in on it and were serious about turning the Dragon Age franchise after that garbage pile that was Dragon Age 2. Huge areas full of quests to explore is nice, bringing some strategy back to the combat is nice; that's the two main things here that make the biggest difference.

[fistfulofmetal]

A few places I've been reading suggests that people shouldn't stick around in Hinterlands and clear it out since you technically can go to other zones sooner and they are more interesting.

So I did that and now I have like 3 times as many quests.

[Great Rumbler]

I'm clearing out the Hinterlands now so that I don't feel like I have to go back there again, unless something important comes up. So far it's taken nearly 7 hours and I've got a few more things yet to do.

[TVC15]

I just broke 70 hours.

[Shino]

I'm clearing out the Hinterlands now so that I don't feel like I have to go back there again, unless something important comes up. So far it's taken nearly 7 hours and I've got a few more things yet to do.

I haven't left the Hinterlands yet.
I'm about 11 hours in.

There are 3 rifts or so that I will likely have to come back to since the enemies have red skulls on them.

This game is huge.

[Great Rumbler]

There are 3 rifts or so that I will likely have to come back to since the enemies have red skulls on them.

Yeah, same here, but I've got just about everything else taken care of so far [except for getting into Redcliff, which I haven't figured out yet].

[Great Rumbler]

The part at the end of Act I were everyone started to sing was so corny. 

Bioware thinking they're making the next LOTR.

[toku]

I like the multiplayer 

[mjemirzian]

Good RPG, I always liked the Dragon Age series even DA 2. Playing on Nightmare w/ Friendly Fire and imo it's easier than DA 2.

Those assassin elites in DA2 were so annoying, nothing nearly as bad in DA3 so far.

[demi]

Is Nightmare unlocked from the start?

[mjemirzian]

Yeah it's unlocked. I rolled a mage (mages are OP in every Dragon Age), best early game setup seems to be 2x barrier mage, 1x shield warrior, 1x ranged rogue (Varric).

Worst enemy in the game so far is the terror demon that teleports underneath you, erupts and knocks everyone down, then does AOE damage + slow. Sometimes you have to fight 3 at once. Enemy damage is very high on nightmare so barrier w/ cooldown reduction, tanking, and crowd control is important.

[Shino]

Man... I'm 20 hours into this game and I feel like I've only done 3 main missions.

[Brehvolution]

[Great Rumbler]

At least male characters get two viable female love interests. Try playing as a lesbian.

[Great Rumbler]

It's pretty legit. Runs rings around DA2 and is better at being its own game, unlike DA1 which was trying to appeal to fans of the older games and still bring in new audiences. Tons of content, too, lots of huge locations to explore that are full of quests and things to do. Combat is solid, fast-paced but still offers the opportunity to slow things down and focus on tactics and strategy for harder fights.

[demi]

Havent started yet. It looks really legit, though. Been watching clips on my friend feed.

[Human Snorenado]

Legit. There's enough gameplay to satisfy anyone.

I also really enjoyed DA1, and this scratches that itch. It's mostly overworld; wish there were more dungeons/cave type shit, but oh well. Still really well done.

[toku]

DA:I is legit. I still haven't finished campaign because I met some cool people playing multiplayer so now I'm addicted to leveling and unlocking all the characters. Between SP and MP I have over 60 hours in the game easy.

[demi]

LMAO

[toku]

Sorry, I do not trust you.

[Great Rumbler]

Yeah, I'm pretty much aced the Wicked Hearts quest. :flex

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I exposed Gaspard's sister in front of everybody, then I forced a truce between Briana, Celene, and Gaspard. I'm like "You guys work for me now." and they just had to sit there and take their L.

[close]

[toku]

Yeah, I'm pretty much aced the Wicked Hearts quest. :flex

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I exposed Gaspard's sister in front of everybody, then I forced a truce between Briana, Celene, and Gaspard. I'm like "You guys work for me now." and they just had to sit there and take their L.

[close]

Pretty much what I did but

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I told them to work for the good of orlais

[close]

[Cerveza mas fina]

Still feel like I should wait on the Goty pack nxt year.

But with the good feedback its getting hard to resist.

[Stoney Mason]

Been playing it for the last couple of days. There are things I like and things I don't like from a direction standpoint. This is clearly not a Dragon Age 2 style debacle. It's a much better game than that. And for the most part I see how most people, especially if you are into action style rpgs would find a lot to really love here. At minimum this is a good game.

That being said, I find myself missing the direction of the original dragon age origins. There are just a lot of small little things that add up to a decent amount of stuff for me that makes this a less enjoyable experience than origins. I'll wait until I get much much closer to finishing before I go into real detail because I'm still relatively early so I don't want to speak about things that may change or just may grow on me as I go along more.

As a big general comment though, the game feels like it was influenced a lot by things like mmorpgs and that ubi-soft style of sticking a thousand activity icons on a map and calling that content or depth. I'm just not sure I'm a huge fan of that school of design relative to some others.

[Stoney Mason]

About halfway through. Game does grow on you somewhat as you play more into it.

[chronovore]

http://imgur.com/a/VNjNQ

Bunch of screenshots. Holy shit, it's gorgeous.

[Madrun Badrun]

Motherfucker, my keep data did not import correctly now I'm 6 hours in and don't know if I should restart.  Hawke's brother died goddamn it. 

[Madrun Badrun]

seriously fucking pissed

[Madrun Badrun]

started over; redid my guy and now he has green and pink eyes.  They totally didn't look like that in the creation screen!

[Stoney Mason]

Still haven't beaten the game. I actually took like a week or two break because one night I spent a lot of time crafting and upgrading and re-equipping and the game crashed and I was pissed as I lost that progress. But I've spent enough time to talk intelligently about it in a review kind of way.

So the game is very good albeit with some very big flaws. It's also a big direction change away from the model of KOTOR/DA:Origins/etc which had been the dominant design philosophy of Bioware once the design changed from those older Baldur's Gate style games. This is clearly the new way to design an RPG for Bioware and at first it annoyed me and I was frustrated but now I've just gotten over it and realize it for what it is. Just a different way to design an RPG to attract a modern audience that puts a great deal of importantance in time played in a post Skyrim world.

So the game is just massive. With a crapload of content. Maybe the most I've ever come across in a traditional RPG outside of Bethesda's stuff. It's the complete opposite from Dragon Age 2. As some one who knows how hard it is to create content for this kind of stuff, I do tip my hat to Bioware because this took a lot of work and time.

Now the content isn't the deepest. Which is where my first disconnect came in. In almost all RPG's you have a certain number of "big/main quests" which is maybe half the game. And then you have the other half of the game which is generally a lot of sidequests. Some well detailed quests and some not.

DA:I just explodes the amount of side quests. And most of them are clearly in the filler category. So your experience depends almost completely on how much you wish to fill up on the filler content before you do the main content. You can literally bore yourself out of your mind doing the filler stuff and that wasn't really possible in older Bioware games. There was only so much secondary content in those games and then it was clear you were supposed to move onto the main quest. But this game has so much filler content that you have to make a decision yourself on when to stop like Skyrim.

It's definitely a different way to design a Bioware rpg. And while I'm probably in the camp that wants less content in general and just deeper content, I'm not sure my opinion is the most common one especially among the more casual audience. Doing the filler content isn't painful. It's not awful. And I generally tend to find myself willing to do a ton of it. But I also find myself putting on a podcast and just sort of zoning out as I clear maps doing this stuff which I never do in other rpgs. I can't figure out if that's a bad thing. I mean its not my personal ideal way to enjoy a game but like an addict I find myself still doing the vast bulk of the content so its this weird mix of not hating it but also not really enjoying it. It's just kind of there. And you can literally chew through many many dozens of hours on this type of stuff. So that's that. I could totally see somebody hating all the side-content. And I could see another type of person feel like they are getting bang for their buck. I'm not sure how I feel about it, although I can say for a fact that I preferred the approach of Dragon Age Origins personally.

The combat is meh. The game has clearly been shifting over to being an action game since the first once, and its fun enough in its way but its also mindless after a while and very rote. The combat situations presented are tactically boring and simple for the most part. The tactical combat UI is garbage imo and only necessary in dragon fights. I'm playing on hard but the other issue is that it's very easy to just over level for anything that doesn't scale just because of the vast amount of filler content. Which creates a slightly weird situation where you go looking for areas that are around your level from area to area so you just don't steamroll the game and can actually get equipment for your proper levels.
 
I love the crafting system and herb system to lesser degree. But the crafting stuff is really well done. I find myself spending a crazy amount time doing that to eke out the best stuff which is the way it should be. The whole you have a castle that you can upgrade part is awesome. Every RPG should have that since RPG's are essentially just extended power fantasies. They should go further in that direction in the next one.

The story is "okay". I mean Dragon Age games have never necessarily had great stories imo but the characters tend to really make the game. I think these are probably average characters for Bioware. None of them especially offend me nor do any of them especially jump out as being memorable.

I think that's most of the main stuff. It's a good game. Even a very good game. I don't think its an all time classic for me though. There are absolutely great parts in it. Or elements that are impressive in scope and scale and graphics, etc.

But I'm not quite blown away at the level of the reviews but its absolutely solid and a large step forward from Dragon Age 2 which going into it, was honestly all I really hoped for.

[Human Snorenado]

I lost interest after I got to Skyhold or whatever it's called- haven't played this in almost a month I think. It's a good game but I feel it suffers from too much ubi soft-dom if that makes sense.

[Great Rumbler]

I beat the game a few days ago, had about 70-something hours into it. There were a few more things that I could have done, but I completed the biggest part of the side content and NPC storylines.

[Positive Touch]

I would once again like to stress how shamefully shitty the 360 version of this game is, and how mad I am at paying full price for it.

[Rufus]

How easy is it to tell wether a side-quest is going to be worth your time or not?

[toku]

How easy is it to tell wether a side-quest is going to be worth your time or not?

by doing the ones that sound the most exciting to you

[Rufus]

Does it disappoint expectations a lot in that regard?

[TVC15]

Every zone also has its own line of story quests that bring you pretty much all over the map anyway, so random mmo/filler quests being all over the place never bugged me--you're going to naturally end up near most of the quest points if you're following the main line.

By the time people are getting sick of the mmo/filler quests, they probably have far more than enough power points to complete the game's story anyway. If you find yourself getting tired of the quests, just go and finish the story missions before you get sick of the game. I didn't do nearly all of the available quests and I still had about 120 extra/superfluous power post-endgame.

[Beezy]

Any reason to play Origins before this? Seems like most of you agree that Origins is the better game.

[Stoney Mason]

Any reason to play Origins before this? Seems like most of you agree that Origins is the better game.

I think you can just play whichever interests you in whatever order. The game has changed so much that there isn't really a lot of value in playing them in order. I mean there is the concept of a world state and your choices carrying over but its really minor compared to something like Mass Effect so its not really a huge draw to play them in order to get some sort of canonical experience. 

[Stoney Mason]

Every zone also has its own line of story quests that bring you pretty much all over the map anyway, so random mmo/filler quests being all over the place never bugged me--you're going to naturally end up near most of the quest points if you're following the main line.

By the time people are getting sick of the mmo/filler quests, they probably have far more than enough power points to complete the game's story anyway. If you find yourself getting tired of the quests, just go and finish the story missions before you get sick of the game. I didn't do nearly all of the available quests and I still had about 120 extra/superfluous power post-endgame.

This is all true. I just think its a different experience than what people have been trained to do compared to other western RPG's (including the other dragon age games) outside of Bethesda games. So that's why there is this big disconnect with a lot of people (Which also happened to me initially).

[Rufus]

Yeah, I've learned to ignore side-content in recent years. I was just wondering if the insubstantial time-wasters are obvious at first glance. I imagine there are patterns you recognize, but what looks like a fetch quest at first might also turn into something more, just to mix it up. I presume they don't have multiple kinds of quest/activity markers the way other genres do.

[Stoney Mason]

Yeah, I've learned to ignore side-content in recent years. I was just wondering if the insubstantial time-wasters are obvious at first glance. I imagine there are patterns you recognize, but what looks like a fetch quest at first might also turn into something more, just to mix it up I presume they don't have multiple kinds of quest/activity markers the way other genres do.

The system in general is confusing at first. There is a war table that has major missions marked with a little green thing over them. So you can always tell where those are. But it absolutely does take a while to discern slightly more important minor quests from less important minor quests.

Basically each area has a map associated with it, and then you have a billion icons on that map that represent minor quests. So its absolutely at first hard to distinguish the importance of these varying quests. I think most people probably just move across the map doing all nearby quests until they get a grasp on the system. So yes, I would say after a while you absolutely can tell what are the more important side quests mainly because they probably end up sounding more unique than the other quests which follow a simple formula of collect X number of shards across the map or kill X number of evil wizards across the map.

I think RPG players tend to be completionists so it feels a little weird to bounce around and leave dangling quests in areas although technically you have to in theory because some areas of a map may have content that you   can't do until you hit a higher level.

The reality is that how I tend to do the quests is just finish off as much as I can do in an area that I can either figure out or is of appropriate level and then bounce around to another area until I get bored. You want to do a lot of bouncing around especially early though because that is how you get the other party members.

[TVC15]

Every zone also has its own line of story quests that bring you pretty much all over the map anyway, so random mmo/filler quests being all over the place never bugged me--you're going to naturally end up near most of the quest points if you're following the main line.

By the time people are getting sick of the mmo/filler quests, they probably have far more than enough power points to complete the game's story anyway. If you find yourself getting tired of the quests, just go and finish the story missions before you get sick of the game. I didn't do nearly all of the available quests and I still had about 120 extra/superfluous power post-endgame.

This is all true. I just think its a different experience than what people have been trained to do compared to other western RPG's (including the other dragon age games) outside of Bethesda games. So that's why there is this big disconnect with a lot of people (Which also happened to me initially).

It happened to me, too. I was letting the completionist and side quest addict get the best of me. At about 75 hours or so, I noticed myself starting to get bored and the formula was starting to run thin, and I eventually mentally said "I need to wrap this up NOW." And because there are only like 6 main story missions, it only took like 2 more hours to finish.

After finishing the game, I did go back a week or so later to walk through the main lines of the remaining zones that I had not opened, and I was able to appreciate them. Except the big fucking night desert area, which I guess you're supposed to actually go to early in the game.

[Great Rumbler]

So how much hours in order to do every single side quest including 100% of the MMO-filler fetch ones? 100 hours or more?

I don't think 100 hours would be out of the question if you were trying to do a completionist run. But there's also a lot of stuff that's mutually exclusive [especially with regards to player character gender/race], so one run through the game wouldn't be enough for everything.

[Human Snorenado]

So how much hours in order to do every single side quest including 100% of the MMO-filler fetch ones? 100 hours or more?

Probably pretty easily, yeah

[Stoney Mason]

So how much hours in order to do every single side quest including 100% of the MMO-filler fetch ones? 100 hours or more?

Depends on how fast you are. I can tell you that I'm going to do as much of it as I can and I'll probably end up well over 150 hours based on the pace I'm currently on. But I'm slow as fuck and spend a shitload of time collecting herbs and crafting shit which sucks up a lot of time.

[TVC15]

100 sounds about right. I was at 80-85 and all I had left was shards and dragon hunting, mostly. I would have kept playing but after 3 or 4 dragons, the rest wouldn't spawn, even after patches.

[a slime appears]

Kind of wish I didn't buy this game on a lark when it was on sale for $40.

I only put in like 6 hours into DA before I fell asleep, avoided DA2 since just about everyone considered it hot garbage, and I'm walking into this one not knowing what the fuck is going on. It looks nice on the PS4 though.

[Positive Touch]

kotaku has a lore summary that I used

[a slime appears]

Thanks for the heads up. I'll read it before I try jumping back in.

Here's the link in-case anyone else is interested: http://kotaku.com/a-beginners-guide-to-all-things-dragon-age-1658487212

[demi]

Its aight. Nightmare gets stupid easy once you hit Skyhold. If you want to break the game even more, pick Knight Enchanter (if you didnt, main Vivienne). Tempest Rogue got nerfed in Patch 5.

I'm about done with it, about tojust ignore everything else and beeline it to the 1000 before Type-0.

[Stoney Mason]

This game is dope.

It makes a very good early impression but it starts to wear on you after awhile...


I still haven't beat this game yet. I keep picking it up and starting and then stopping. I know I should ignore the sidequests but I refuse as I feel like I'm probably only going to play it once so I better experience EVERYTHING.  Even though I know that's why I keep stopping because a lot of the side content isn't very engaging. It's like the worst game ever if you have an anal personality about competing stuff in RPG's.

Which is once again not to say its a bad game. There is a good 40 to 70 hour game in here. The problem is that I'm way over that amount of time with no end in sight. It's like Vietnam.  :'(

[Cerveza mas fina]

So as long as you stick to the main quest you get a good 30 hour game with no MMO quests?

If you dont like open world games is this still worth it?

[demi]

Did every misc. achievement, just need to do the final few story missions. My in game clock is hitting 100 hours, but there is definite idle time there. I did not even finish everything there is to do, I am definitely burned out, had my fill of WRPG action. Ready to jump into a much superior J R P G

[Positive Touch]

yeah I like the game  definitely feel like it woulda benefited from being more linear like Mass Effect was. the best parts outside the story missions are the times where you find the minidungeons or are working on the main main in each map. the padding in between is just haphazardly placed mobs and shitty loot. it's never interesting.

overall I like the game a lot but like everyone else I think it'd be way better if they cut out all the fat.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Demi is this game worth the effort in your opinion? I have that free trial from EA to get started.

[Positive Touch]

also I'm gonna need western rpg devs to do two things to improve their games:

1 - stop with the shitty loot all over the fucking place. you know that there's enough unique items that everyone who comes across this shit won't use it, so stop making me sort thru it. it's boring.

2 - I like lore but I'd appreciate it if devs trimmed that down too. like if you find yourself typing up a note that starts as a mundane worklog that eventually hints that there's something evil going on, just stop. we know they found monsters; it's a fucking videogame. it's boring to read and ends up detracting from the atmosphere instead of adding to it. do better.

[Cerveza mas fina]

also I'm gonna need western rpg devs to do two things to improve their games:

1 - stop with the shitty loot all over the fucking place. you know that there's enough unique items that everyone who comes across this shit won't use it, so stop making me sort thru it. it's boring.

2 - I like lore but I'd appreciate it if devs trimmed that down too. like if you find yourself typing up a note that starts as a mundane worklog that eventually hints that there's something evil going on, just stop. we know they found monsters; it's a fucking videogame. it's boring to read and ends up detracting from the atmosphere instead of adding to it. do better.

Wait you don't want to find 20 pages of a log scattered all across the world detailing how some evil spread in the home village of the writer? 

Someone spent a day typing that shit up yo...

I wouldn't say this is exclusive to WRPG's though.

[demi]

Demi is this game worth the effort in your opinion? I have that free trial from EA to get started.

Yup, but theres a looooooot to do. Which is funny since the actual "story" is pretty short.