Dragon Age: Inquisition
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I really ought to try to bother finishing this game someday.
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How far are you into it, @Rainbow-Unicorn ? The only slowdown from a bum rush to the ending is a potential series of war table stuff that take about 2 RL hours to complete if you're close to the end.
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I dropped off after I completed the Hawke or X choice. I need to get back around to it.
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That's about when I took my break. That was about when I hit my XP/resource hump where I switched from having not enough stuff to having too much stuff. The world isn't worth fighting for at a high level and more power/influence than I know what to do with.
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DAI was sadly disappointing for me. It looked gorgeous, and there were certainly aspects that I liked, but overall the story was less compelling than either of the other two Dragon Age games, and the companions overall as a group were less awesome than previous games. (That said, I don't want to date Cassandra so much as like literally just worship the ground she walks on, I love her so much.) And the ending was suuuuuuuuuper underwhelming. Sadface.
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Does it get good? I keep getting fucked up (TPK every time!) by wolves trying to get to the first town. It got frustrating so I put the game down and never looked back.
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@SG It definitely gets better than the Hinterlands. Despite my overall disappointment, there are some awesomely epic things in the game.
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@SG, Bears ripped me apart early on. It's partially a learning curve and partially picking the right party... which you don't have much of a choice with in the beginning of the game. The first part of the game is really a matter of working around problem enemies that you can't handle til you're about level 3-4... that's when you should have enough special skills to start causing some actual damage. This is especially so as a distance Rogue or Mage, both classes being fragile as glass early on. If it kills you once, the true definition of insanity is to try and face the same enemy again. I had that with a rift that was in the middle of the Hinterlands and I kept charging at it. I went back a couple levels later and it was soooooo much easier.
@Roz, Cassandra warmed up to me well later into the game and I really liked her story arc, especially with how she played out with Varric. By that time, I was already well entrenched with puppy eyed Dorian but I felt like she was the one of the characters who really grew from a cold-hearted salty bitch on the outside to a character who is someone you can really relate to in the game. Then there were characters like Sera, Solas, or Vivienne who were sort of caricatures. Iron Bull was an unexpectedly interesting companion. No one captivated me like DA:OA Anders though, who happens to be my favorite companion throughout the series. He was witty, sorta broken, and quirky. Too bad Bioware wrecked that with mass murdering war criminal Anders in DA2 who was all sad and sullen and boring.
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@Apollonius Yeah, I just thought it was ridiculous that a small pack of wolves would tear through a party of dudes wearing metal armour like that. It seemed to save all of the rolls, because every time I'd reload, it would be exactly the same story. Haven't touched the game since 2012. I guess if I could be arsed to find a crack for it to edit my sheets I might take another swing so I could see the story everyone keeps talking about, but the gameplay is awful in my opinion.
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I got to judge a bear. I'm happy.
(Also, if anyone wants to see the game and not play it doing the mages storyline, I stream it every Monday. Horrible player. I'm still near the start on my alt, and I switched over to the DLC when it came out, and my videos are long at about 2 hours each, but I do everything.)
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In fact, the DA:I does do some strange activity in terms of its percentage rolls. For example, there is an item that will give you a 40% chance of 'Mastercrafting' an item which gives you +10% to all of the weapon's stats. But if you save before and retry over and over again with the same item, if you didn't get a Mastercrafted item the first go, you will never get a Mastercrafted item with that particular 40% chance item. It has something to do with how Bioware games calculate out %s. The chance that you will get two Mastercrafted items in a row with the same Mastercrafting item (there's a lot of Mastercraft/Mastercrafting and it's their screwed up terminology) is effectively 8%.
DA:O had, admittedly, a tougher learning curve than either DA2 or DA:I, in my opinion. There was a lot more involved in tactics and how the classes/abilities meshed with one another. In DA:I, I mean, you can just hold right trigger while casting random abilities as a ranged Rogue or Mage and as long as you keep your distance, the combat handles itself. God forbid, however, on the off chance that your fragile-as-glass char is taken down from behind and you get stuck with an unfamiliar class in the middle of combat doing who knows what.
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@Apollonius said:
tl;dr Sorry for the thread necro, DA:I was okay.
I hated DA:I. And not just because it was clearly made for higher-gen consoles, yet Bioware made and marketed a buggy version for lower-gen consoles.
Oh, sure, there were parts of it I liked. I liked the crafting, I liked the open world, and I liked the ability to explore. I got killed quite often tackling Rifts that I wasn't ready for.
But it wasn't a good game. The Knight-Enchanter build was OP'd to the point where tackling the greatest dragons was a meh activity. The NPCs were boring, one-sided, or pathetic. I would gladly take Fenris from DA2's story over just about any of the DA:I NPCs -- except for Dorian's, maybe.
It was an anti-climactic, disappointing installment for a wonderful world of politics and intrigue. It really opened up the "dark fantasy" world to me. I just wish it was more polished from a story standpoint.
It should be noted that I played The Last of Us after this game. So, no prejudice from that.
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I luckily did not have to deal with it on my Xbox 360. I saw the difference for AC4 on 360 and my PC and I made a conscious effort to abandon my 360 except for a few legacy games. I also played after version 1.6 where most of the game breaking bugs were resolved, although I still had weird clipping issues and if you scroll your camera around in a crowded area, the character doesn't render correctly and I only see lips and eyes discombobulated.
I haven't played the Knight-Enchanter build yet but I am pretty sure that will kill any interest in a second play through from what everyone has told me so far. I liked Cassandra's development and I loved Dorian but I agree that most of the companions were just flat and boring. It was like they took Fenris and multiplied him a couple times. Everyone was just dur, sad, dur.
The whole game smacked of Mass Effect 3's worst components, with a war table that had no real meaning to the game, arbitrary metrics that ultimately didn't change incredibly crucial components of the game towards the end (Well of Sorrows, Flemmeth) and they again slap together a drawn out multiplayer component with micropayments (that they need to constantly reiterate as being optional) that could have been used to bolster the main game... or at least make it relevant to the overall world.
As mentioned prior, I'm still not writing off Bioware, but I'm losing my patience. All the good will garnered from ME1, ME2, DAO, and DAO:A are wearing really thin. DA2 (I know you liked it @Ganymede ) was not awful but very disappointing with its literally copy/paste dungeons and strange fight mechanics. DA:I needed to really hit it out of the park and it was more like two strikes and four balls to walk to first. I used to enthusiastically buy their collector's sets in pre-sale and hand over my wallet for an endless stream of DLC... but I think that time has passed.
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I admit I will shut-up-and-take-my-money for ME4. Especially if they get back on the StarFlight plot with the unstable suns.
I admit that I miss the RPG complexity of DA:O. It made the replays feel fresher than the skill-tree approach of the later games, and discovering that ice storm + fire storm = holy shit? That kind of touch is always welcome. I'll forgive the first Dragon Age games for being unbalanced for that and for their superior storytelling,
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@Apollonius said:
DA:I needed to really hit it out of the park and it was more like two strikes and four balls to walk to first.
It did, and BioWare needs to seriously consider the strength of its stories over the mechanics of its gaming. I would have gladly taken another DA:O or DA2 if it had a storyline as compelling as the ME series, Uncharted, or The Last of Us. Sadly, it did not.
Investment in your stories pays off in huge dividends. The most memorable games are not the ones that have the neatest play options, unless you're creating a simulation game like X-COM.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede Well hey, now they're making Mass Effect Andromeda....
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@Alzie said:
Mass Effect Andromeda
Shut up and take my money.
(I may need help, but I'm content with it.)
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I've played through DA:I six times now, which is way more than I played through any of the previous installments, and it's easily my favorite one. >_>
I luckily did not have to deal with it on my Xbox 360. I saw the difference for AC4 on 360 and my PC and I made a conscious effort to abandon my 360 except for a few legacy games.
There's a 60fps fix for the PC game, you just have to turn it on AFTER the initial cutscene/intro bit for the game, and never have it on if you're going to do multiplayer. It made so much shit look so much better.
Games like this on console just make me grind my teeth. That people who have the option for both choose a console version is just insanity.
Edit: I'll also happily give them my money for ME:A. Honestly as much as I have bitches about all of the games at one point or another, none of them haven't felt like they were worth the money to me, and I'm happy to have played all of them. My general enjoyment for DA games is probably DA:I > DA:A > DA:O > DA2, and for ME it'd be ME2 > ME3 > ME1.
ME1 gets lots of story love but it was so supported by what might just be the single most shitty equipment mechanics and inventory management I've ever seen, to the point where it actually sucked the fun out of the game. It was much more fun to play through later with a cheat just to give myself good gear and never pick up anything inventory related.
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@HelloRaptor said:
DA:I > DA:A > DA:O > DA2
Hah! I am vindicated! Even you admit DA2 was a shitty game!
I cannot hear your keyboard banging about relative comparisons not being the same as absolute statements. I only hear "look how crappy DA2 is".
I like my world much better now.
