A Apollonius
Jul 26, 2015, 1:58 AM

Six months in, I'm late to the game, quite literally. But I was being cheap and finally got it for my PC at $15 from Amazon.

  1. Graphics look okay at Ultra but the fact that my rig can handle it at Ultra with only a handful of screen tears suggest that the graphics just weren't that great... and they weren't. I made the mistake of playing DA:I after finishing up Mordor (after a 6 month pause) and man, everything looked last gen. (i5 4690K @ 4.5 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 RAM @ 2133, MSI Nvidia GTX 760 Gaming Edition)

  2. Movement mechanics, after playing Mordor and Assassin's Creed Unity pretty much blew. I went on a rant with @Monogram about this the other day... so the platforming aspects for some of the things in the game were pretty much terrible. Even with a 360 controller, I could not, for the love of me, get the right precision to do the fine motor movements required for some of the janky jumps and climbs I needed. The worst were hills where you're 95% up the hill and then there's a ledge a pixel too high for you to get on top of. Now you have to go all the way to the bottom and start the fuck over.

  3. Ending was... meh. Let me rewind a little. When I finished Mass Effect 1, I was blown away by the ending. It had the perfect tenor, it did what I wanted it to do, and I was sold on Bioware. Fast forward to DA:I and... I mean, it was what I expected and it was sort of anticlimatic. The fight against Corypheus was pretty generic and I got no particular closure. I know that the DLC that is in play and one that is possibly coming up is designed for post-game excitement, but it's been six months, there's only one non-essential DLC, and I keep hearing rumors that the next DLC is meant to wrap things up. I guess the aftermarket sales prospective for DA:I wasn't that great for a Game-of-the-Year game.

  4. Here's how my final save looked:

! Level 23 Rogue Archer Assassin (stupidly OP)... Imprisoned Mages, Non-Believer, Killed Celene and put Gaspard/Briana to rule together, Grey Wardens rebuilt with Hawke saved from the Fade, Loghain in the Fade, Leliana as new Divine, Morrigan drank from the Well and had a kid with the Grey Warden + Archdemon soul.

I ended up romancing Dorian, who, despite my usual preferences, was actually not my first or even second choice. I was entertaining Iron Bull (but his companion mission took too long to appear) and I may have pissed off Cassandra enough that it didn't seem very thematic. Dorian was kinda awesome, to be honest. His tarot card once you romance him is actually really cool too. Prolly my favorite of the romance cards.

I made a tactical error early on regarding the election, and realized I had a gazillion points for Vivienne whose perspectives I generally agreed with until it was pretty clear a quarter of the way in that she was just using me to get to a better position and that her perspectives were actually pretty damn extreme. I spent a crap ton of time trying to undo that and get my favored candidate to win.

My party tended to be Dorian as a mainstay (spec'd Fire Mage/Barrier and his Necro tree) with a warrior (usually Iron Bull/two handed but sometimes Blackwall/two handed or Cassandra/sword+shield) and most often than not, Vivienne because Solas actually disliked me from the get-go and it never improved. He was the only companion whose companion quest never triggered for me. Anyway, I liked Vivienne's bitchiness more. Her interactions with Iron Bull were hilarious.

Sera pissed me off but I finished her quests for completion's sake. I didn't mind her politics but her tone of voice really got grating. Also, I didn't really need her as a second Rogue (if I ever needed one, it'd be Varric and his soothing sarcastic tones). I also never used Cole (more human) but would if I had a place for him in my team.

So I didn't really craft til the very very end (on Normal, you get pelted with decent items) but I was pretty much an OCD resource collector, especially metals, since they could pop up with a fade touched that you really want (like the one that gives you guard). I had something like 400 Stormheart. I just went Dragon-everything for my Rogue.

I feel like I spent a lot of time fretting about completion and getting the perfect ending as I wanted it (which didn't really matter much in hindsight) to fully enjoy the game, and certain things like the platforming killed my mood. One Shard in the Exalted Plains really really really pissed me off. The Hissing Wastes seemed like an afterthought and a lot of the stuff like Skyhold upgrades seemed... well... rushed.

I want to say that after DA2 (which I enjoyed but fell well below expectations) and the ME3 ending (which still didn't quite satisfy me after the patch), DA:I resurrected my hopes for Bioware... and I'm not entirely sure I feel one way or another. Assassin's Creed: Black Flag single-handedly resurrected the AC franchise (only for Ubisoft to blow it with AC:U) and DA:I fell short of that exuberance. I'm willing to give Bioware a third chance to make things right with either a satisfying DA:I DLC or ME4... but somehow, I feel like my love affair with Bioware is about over. Put it another way, if I bought this full price retail, I'd have been somewhat put off. But at $15, the price was just right.

tl;dr Sorry for the thread necro, DA:I was okay.