There's a leading question if ever I saw one.

I feel your pain. My hippie has been down since the 60s.

 

I blame The Man (also EA).

The Warden was a weird, mute, bug-eyed creep.

 

But even they would be put off by the insane obsession with them.

 

 

Also

 

(I'm not even sure this is where I should post this. I couldn't see another place to.)

 

I've been trying to figure out if my HP will run Inquisition before I get it, but I go to Game Debate to see if I can run and when I input my specs, there aren't the right CPU and CPU models showing up. 

 

I have a HP - Pavilion 

CPU: AMD A8-series 

RAM: 4G 

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 8210 

OS: Windows 8.1 (64 bit) 

 

Anyone know if it'll work?

 

 

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it doesn't look like your laptop has the specs to handle DA:I. Your GPU just doesn't have the horsepower to run the game at anything resembling playable .
 

I'm very much interested in whether the game in question is fun to play, and less so in how to categorize it.

Where did you get that armor? Also pics please! I want to see what it looks like fully. It looks sexy up top.

 

I have it too, actually. His armor is the tier 3 Warrior gear: mine's wearing Sturdy Battlemaster Armor, but there are other variants as well. You can buy it from the merchant in the Hissing Wastes. His helm is the Helm of the Inquisitor, which drops from Mistral in the Emerald Graves. I'll put a couple pics of my so very sexy Inquisitor below (and link to more here, in case that's not enough hunk for ya ).

 

 

You are almost right. The best experience is Pen and Paper, without graphics at all. But since in computer it needs a graphic representation we can have it, but despite your irony there is really no need to represent clothes, and other stuff. A text based is enough. And there are a lot of good text based RPGs, both single player and multiplayer. One of the games that I invested a lot of time of my life is ninjamanger, a naruto simulator, and there is no graphic representation of fights beyond portraits bumping into each other. I had A LOT MORE FUN with ninjamanager than Inquisition that's for sure, I spent 4 years of so playing the game and I would still be playing if they updated to the 4th ninja war.

If I can build, if there is strategy, I don't need anything else.

 

Pen and paper!? Bourgeois luxuries!

I do. But I guess most people won't. Not a game for people with imagination anymore, it became all flash no substance, if they see on the screen they are happy. Is not about roleplaying anymore, is about seeing your role played on the screen by the Bioware character.

 

So if leaving an aspect of the player character to the player's imagination is preferable to implementing it in-game, why stop at the player character's voice? Why not leave them naked? Players can just imagine their character's clothes. Why do they need to have a model at all? It's just style over substance.  Serious roleplayers picture their character in their heads. I played Inquisition without speakers or a monitor. I just banged on my keyboard randomly and let the whole thing play out in my head. I beat it on insanity. People today are so pampered.

We're missing the salient fact that BioWare never officially released the video footage from that PAX demo. The video we saw was cell phone footage, recorded by an attendee. They never officially made much of the stuff they hyped during that demo part of their marketing campaign. Probably because they understood that there was a chance some of the features they were previewing might not make the cut, once everything was said and done. Yeah, I'm a bit miffed that some of the stuff (like the more dynamic events in Crestwood, or destruction as a core part of gameplay) never made it into the finished game. But I also don't think it fair to blame their marketing effort for promoting the game dishonestly, at least not in this particular case. PAX aside, I think it's fair to give them credit for being cautious and conservative and not hyping features when they couldn't be sure those features would make it to release.

You want them to take inspiration from ancient Rome, eh? Good idea. Who doesn't love hot man-on-man action, after all?

Do I even need to say who Iron Bull is?

 

He's the big sexy Qunari, duh. Everyone knows that.

I have a biotic dealing with singularities.

There is another one in my party who loves barriers.

And I'm pretty sure Sera uses biotic charge too.

Varric was an engineer last time I checked.

Do I even need to say who Iron Bull is?

 

Sadly there is no Kai Leng =(

Oh, wait, did you even check rogue enemies moving... specially the elves from the Arbor Wilds? I'm pretty sure one of them is Kai

 

=)

 

Bravo! A textbook example of the argument by selective observation, also known as cherry picking. Well done.

Serious genuine real talk now though.

 

No creme de la meme elfy business.

 

This is a video game. This is Thedas. This is NOT your personal tumblr or whatever. People are NOT going to use fancy gender-neutral pronouns in this setting because they're scared they might trigger someone. This is a world where demons literally FALL OUT OF THE SKY and zombie ghoul monsters with poison blood CRAWL OUT OF THE GROUND. I very much doubt the first thing going through someone's mind in Thedas is "do I refer to this person as he, she, zhe, it or they", it's probably something more along the lines of "I seriously hope I'm not stabbed to death or set on fire today". Just because you're a sensitive snowflake and your heart aches whenever a white cis male calls you by your genetic gender doesn't mean that the developers of a videogame are going to EDIT THEIR PRE-RECORDED LINES to pander to 'muh gender-neutral pronoun anti-oppression gamergate no negative reaction lyfestyle'. That costs money and recording time. They could use that money and recording time to make a DLC that actually expands on the story, or on the characters, or what have you.

 

I know that MIGHT seem a bit harsh. I know I MIGHT seem like a bit of a arse right now. I know this was a suggestion, and I know it's on the BSN so it should be expected. But, jesus christ, it's 3:30 am and this is literally the dumbest **** I've seen all day. And all yesterday too, honestly.

 

A person politely asks to make Dragon Age a more welcoming place. You rage at them for daring to waste the mighty developer's time with "sensitivity" and "heart ache" from being misgendered (which are apparently trivial in light of the very real fantasy battles being waged all across Thedas). And all of this is so unimportant that you take the time to make a very serious post to educate this impertinent interloper on exactly why they can't have what they asked for: in brief, because it might detract from the things you want. And as we all know, any time the less privileged ask for something, what they really want is for something to be taken away from us. Lucky for that person you didn't hold back and gave them some real tough talk. So congratulations, you saved yourself from having to critically examine the portrayal of gender in the games you play, and you saved the BSN from being infected with compassion or inclusiveness.

Yes. I checked out the Influence glitch and that was gone. So... something was patched.

 

Try repairing the game, it's a shot in the dark but couldn't hurt (in the main Origin window, under My Games, right click Dragon Age: Inquisition then click Repair Game). If that doesn't work, a reinstall might be in order.

Really? How about no and leaving us alone.

 

Us? Are you a developer? If you are, that's a pretty unprofessional response. If (as I suspect) you're not, why does this person's post bother you? Their request doesn't involve you at all.

I wish it was organized in a way that would make it more user friendly. And I wish the tiny gold icon in the top right hand corner, that indicates that you haven't read an entry yet, wasn't nearly invisible. The almost invisible icon is so aggravating when you are trying to find the entries you haven't read yet. 

 

It really is nearly impossible to find new or updated codex entries. The white-gold star used to mark new entries is more often than not lost against the backdrop of the codex card illustrations, which generally use a white-gold color palette. This would be easy for BioWare to fix if they changed the color of the "new" icon something that provided higher contrast, like bright green.

 

To illustrate the problem, here's two codex cards. Try to guess which is read and which is unread.

 

                          

And either he just invented a whole new bunch of sex positions (chunky Tuesday? The Bourne Conspiracy?), or Urban Dictionary needs to up its game.

Jim Sterling has had enough of BioWare inserting their politics into video games, and he's not gonna (ahem) take it anymore. That is, unless Iron Bull is involved.

 

This guy has a pretty good series of game-play videos going. It's about as thorough as you'll find, he's got almost 100 videos up right now.

Origins was really good. It was a great way to introduce the world of Thedas. But it was also the first game in a franchise that could last for another decade or more. To ask BioWare to make the same game, with the same mechanics and game systems, the same scope and size, and same visual style, again and again, would be the slow death of the franchise. A good developer is always be looking to improve their product, even if improving means borrowing someone else's (superior) solution to an existing problem (see for example the dialogue wheel, which made conversations much more interesting, and made it easier to finally give Dragon Age voiced protagonists). If BioWare did not constantly push their games forward, take risks and try new things, their fanbase would wither and die from lack of new interest. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a recipe for slow decay. At the very least, you need to slap a fresh coat of paint on every once in a while.

The thing is, nostalgia can be a really powerful drug. It's sometimes hard to shake the feeling that the past really was a happier time. But in general, even if things really truly were better "back then," our tendency to look at everything with rose-colored glasses makes us ill-equipped to judge honestly.

My advice is to try thinking of Inquisition the way you would meeting a former lover. They're nothing like you remember them, but they seem really happy with their new life and new beau, and they're more popular and well-liked than ever. It wouldn't really be fair to ask them to change back to their old self and come live with you. All you can do is be happy for them, because they have the life they wanted, even if its not the one you did. And if that sounds like a bitter pill to swallow, I sympathize.

They can't really add in specific specialisations via patch.

 

Sera, for example, discusses being a Tempest with Dorian.

 

You're ignoring the evidence against your argument, however. See Cassandra - not actually a Templar, though similar to one. Iron Bull - not a true Reaver, though similar to one. If Inquisition  had followed the DAII pattern when creating companion specs, Sera could still be a kind of Tempest, but her in-game specialization would be a variant of the baseline Tempest (the one available to the Inquisitor), with changes that reflect her personality and background.

 

And I don't know of any reason BioWare wouldn't be able to add in specializations via patch. If their engine was designed to be appropriately modular and extensible, and their engineers correctly used object-oriented practices to implement game systems, then adding in new specs should be no problem. In fact I would consider it a design failure if something like adding new specializations wasn't trivially doable. It was certainly possible in DA:O and DAII, which added specs via DLC several times. Now whether they'd be willing to change the specialization trees for existing characters... I may be hoping for a lot there.

There are also no sustain abilities, but no one is calling out on that either.

 

Well since you mention it...

It's hard to find much of anything about Inquisition  that I would call disappointing. But I was sad that BioWare didn't bring companion-specific specializations forward from DAII. Unique companion specializations did so much for that game. For starters, they added more variety to the gameplay. In Inquisition, no matter what spec you choose, there will always be a companion with the same specialization, making that companion feel less important. In DA II  you could pick, say, the Rogue's Duelist specialization without making Isabela seem redundant. Her Swashbuckler spec was different enough from the Dualist that you could still have variety. At the same time, the similarities between the companions' specializations and those available to Hawke helped introduce the player to the different specialization options. Playing as Anders, for example, might make the player decide to try Spirit Healer for Hawke.

 

But I think the most important benefit was that they tied the narrative and the personalities of companions to the way they behaved in combat. This really helped make the game feel like a more coherent whole. I have to believe the gameplay designers wanted to bring this feature forward, and only scrapped it because of time or budget constraints. The specializations are already there in each companion's personality and background, they just never got implemented in-game: Cassandra isn't a Templar, she's a Seeker. I imagine her "Seeker" specialization as a one-off of the Warrior's Templar tree, including the ability (which she actually describes to the player in a conversation!) to "set the lyrium in a person's blood aflame." Vivienne isn't just a generic Knight Enchanter, she is (or was) First Enchanter. Her character deserves a specialization that reflects this. Same with Cole: he's more than just an Assassin. He should have a specialization that reflects his spirit nature as well. Iron Bull even tells the player in conversation that he's not a true Reaver, he just fights in a similar style. So his specialization could have been based off the Reaver, but with elements that reflect his background as a mercenary leader and Qunari spy.

 

BioWare said they're planning to add more features over time. I couldn't be more excited about this. I hope companion-specific specializations are among the features they'll consider for a future patch.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your letter. It is my sad duty to inform His Highness, however, that the Inquisition will not be providing military support to Starkhaven. It is in this organization's policy not to come to the aid of complete tools. I'm sure His Highness will understand. Might I suggest requesting help from the Qunari? I hear they take quite well to insufferable and sanctimonious. Please do not contact the Inquisition again. Should the Prince choose to ignore this warning, I will have no other choice but to send agents to engage in nude and drunken debauchery in the streets of your fair city.

Yours faithfully,

The Inquisitor

P.S. An acquaintance of mine, Cole, requested that I inform the Prince that he is "killing his buzz" and to "quit being such a drag." Please comply with this, or suffer the aforementioned debauchery scenario.

BTW you guys could argue that the Social Justice age stuff was just /v/ bullshit if the lead designer and writers for this game werent openly promoting social justice on twitter.

Is it so wrong to be attracted to beautiful women?

 

...

I'm used to being vilified for being "intolerant" of people who force themselves on me.

 

The hell are you on about?
 

 

FWIW go ahead and call me a virgin, or fat, or whatever other nonsense.

 

 

I'll just call you incapable of expressing a coherent thought.