Yeah. The wheel comes up. Sometimes the numbers vanish tho.
This game has a ton of content. I'm so glad I didnt watch the twitch stream of the beginning. It was so suprising and very interesting!
I spent about 5 minuites sitting in the menu listening to the music.
Ugh. Yeah, I regret watching as much as I did. At this point, I've seen quite a bit of the beginning, and I hope I don't get bored with it. The prologue is quick, though. Thankfully.
The one I saw was when Varric pointed out that my (human mage) PC had a Free Marcher accent. I had three anwers to that, from ''wow, you're perceptive'' to ''no ****, genius''.
DAMN. Sounds so cool.
Controls on the PC are going to be, at best, difficult to get used to for most people. Some weird decision-making going on there. 
What I love(surprised)
- You can enter seamlessly into less important conversation. You don't even need to click on the NPC. THey start talking to you and you're prompted with the wheel.
What I have trouble is you have to hold a button for auto-attack and your character won't stay on enemy. So sometime I am slashing the air like a moron. I am getting better at it though.
It's so big and there's so many thing to do. I am not really sure if I should or not do something. Should I open a new map ? Should I just clear hinterland before heading out ? So any question and so few answer.
My initial impressions (6 hours in), playing on PC with a controller, hard difficulty:
- Visuals are great. Already seen so many breathtaking vistas in this game, very beautiful. People who say this looks like an MMO don't know what they're talking about.
- The downside to that is the game is pretty demanding in terms of hardware. I'm almost exactly at the recommended spec, but I've had to set most the graphics settings to high (except textures and terrain, which I cranked up to ultra, and antialiasing, which I turned down to medium) instead of ultra to get an average above 30 fps. I'm also getting occasional (it's rare, but annoying) frame skip stutter when moving the camera angle, reminds me of an old vsync implementation bug in SWTOR. Waiting anxiously for optimized NVidia drivers to show up, hopefully they'll provide the much needed 10-15 fps boost and resolve the minor hitches.
- The graphics options deserve a praise, by the way. Lots of options to tinker with - if you're like me and prefer to customize your settings to get the most out of your rig, you can finally do that in a Bioware game. +10 approval from me. Of course, there are also several presets (from Low to Ultra) for people who don't like wasting time on things like this.
- Awesome audio so far, both sounds and music. Voiceovers are of varying quality, but mostly good. Lots of characters with accents so far. Seriously, a LOT of them. Beginning to think reviewers who mentioned bad VO as a con simply did not realize the accent thing is according to the lore, and not cheap voice actors.
- Very advanced character creator, possibly the best I've ever seen. It crashed on me once though on the initial attempt, wasting 30 minutes of tinkering to get the face right. The choice of hairstyles also seems lacking, especially for female characters.
- Loads of things to do, places to explore, hidden caches of loot and resources to find. Crafting system seems to be interesting and have enough depth to remain so.
- Combat will take some time getting used to. It's different from the previous games, but I think I'm beginning to like it. Seems to have more of a skill-based, action-rpg feel to it now when playing without invoking tactical cam.
- Tactical cam seems less convenient to use than the overhead zoomed-out view in PC versions of DAO/DA2 was. Too limited camera zoom levels/view angles, too much extra button presses (I'm using a controller here though, can't comment on KB+mouse).
- Effect from the "no healing except potions" so far: I'm actually forced to think tactically about how to better dispose of lesser opponents quickly and efficiently before they have a chance to chip away at my health, which is good. The tutorial boss had me use up all my healing potions before I finished him, it's a good thing they're replenished for free at the base.
- Still too early to tell about the plot and characters. The initial developments in the story seem to be painted in broad strokes, with little fine detail. Just minimum what you need to know to continue. The game also starts ... weird. I expected at least some kind of intro, a summary of latest events. It literally just dumps you in the aftermath of the breach explosion with zero exposition on what has just happened. Initial conversations with characters at the base were interesting, though, looking forward to more.
- Edited to add this: the game so far has better dialogue wheel options for the main character than ME3. You usually get at least 3 different ways to respond, sometimes more (e.g. you can choose to be curious, indifferent, angry/harsh).
Overall, I'm leaning toward "awesome" on this one, can't wait to jump back in today.
Controls on the PC are going to be, at best, difficult to get used to for most people. Some weird decision-making going on there.
I'll definately agree with this.
I just spent the last week finishing DA2 and DAO and both games expansions and DLC...I fired up DAI and to say the controls feel clunky is an understatement.
After playing for one hour (i know i know) the only major complaint is that tactics camera is pretty...wonky imho.
Other than that, the if-else tactics system is close to non-existent, which is a bummer to say the least.
Cutscenes are locked to 30FPS which looks more like 25FPS >_>
It runs well (all maxed, r9 290, i5-2500K), it looks great (except the facial hair which is abysmal), combat is fun and "punchy", skills feel and sound powerful.
The facial hair is terrible... Same with the eyebrows.
I haven't made it through the prologue yet, so have nothing really to comment on, but My God, this game looks absolutely phenominal. Like super stupidly good looking. Wow. Only other comment is "walk mode".... Bioware, make it happen!
The facial hair is terrible... Same with the eyebrows.
What, you don't want to look like this?
Thanks for the thread OP. I'm one of those people that can't play the game at release due to delays in upgrading my PC. The situation is also made worse by the fact EA pre-emptively cancelled the game in my country due to BS local laws, so I'll have to import it or get it via 3rd party online retailer which looks like it might work but some EA customer service reps caution against. Basically a bunch of us are waiting patiently to ensure there are no activation issues that would crop up later.
Anyway, I'm curious about a couple of things in regards to dialogues and such if someone could shed some light:
1. Do the protagonist's voiced dialogues line with the written dialogue choices properly? In DA2, sometimes Hawke will say things I'd never have expected when choosing certain options.
2. Can we talk to companions freely like in DAO instead of it being heavily controlled by the game like in DA2?
3. I saw on some youtube review that side quests lack dialogue options in regards to if/how you want to help...that basically it's always a yes/no option at best without extra options like in Origins.
Thanks and please no spoilers. 
I'm really digging it. A lot of the sidequests feel very "Fetchy" but I'm just thrilled to be able to get to know the new characters
I'm still in Haven exploring the map and talking to the inital party members and advisers.
I spend 7 hours in that town lol.... almost done now though, and its like the smallest zone on the map.
The next one will probably take like 20 hours to explore everything.
I have that OCD problem where I have to do everything everywhere I go and keep running into the same elfroot / iron deposits and picking them up again.
I already picked like 80 elfroot in the starting area.
But yeah this game is awesome.
Its like Skyrim but as a Dragon Age game, combat has always been elder's scrolls weakest point and so far combat is DAI's strongest point, its awesome.
SO much better than Dragon Age Origins and it makes you forget all about Dragon Age 2.
A real RPG purist doesn't want anything to do with this newfangled raising stats on level up; that concept didn't come along until the 1980s. You should be complaining about not being able to assign stats during character generation.But they deleted the manual stat upgrades at level up
to me that's dumbing down the RPG mechanics.
Not saying it's going to be a bad game btw, but it's also not a 'true RPG', in my book. True RPG's let you handle everything, including the basic stats.
The lack of documentation is driving me crazy. Especially since the game won't even let you look at the character sheets at the start. It's as bad as DA2's opejning in that regard - the entire tutorial offered me nothing at all useful for my preferred playstyle (tactical KBM).
As for the tactical KBM, there are issues. The camera does not follow the controlled character when moving, even outside of combat. So you have to move the camera manually all of the time. And while the camera does kind of free-roam (and I like the low-angle tac can option), the angle is tied to the height, so you can't both zoom out and look ahead at the same time. Also, it appears the tac cam is actually following an invisible character around (it may well be), and that character can fall off cliffs and get stuck, thus immobilising your camera.
But in Action mode, the character will only move when driven (WASD). Even to do things. So you can't click of loot from distance and have the character walk up to the loot. You have to walk up first and then click it. it's like the combat and UI designers never played a BioWare RPG before.
That said, I do think the dialogue wheel and paraphrases have been improved. Too early to tell for sure, yet, but so far I'm enjoying it way more than DA2's. Being able to turn off the tone icons is a huge help. But the paraphrases still sometimes represent the wrong kind of sentences (interrogative paraphrases produce declarative statements),
The Inquisitor's facial expressions are still a problem. He's routinely out of character by looking concerned about things.
The CC is everything we were promised. I was going to complain about the beard options, but not being able to use the one I had wanted from the start meant that I had to improvise, and Inqusition offers much better options for doing that compared to DAO or DA2.
So, to sum up, the controls are pretty bad, the control of the PC's behaviour is still not up to the pre-DA2 BioWare standard, but the game is vastly better than DA2.
I haven't gotten very far, yet, so I can't speak to the combat abilities, but the tactics system basically isn't there (a massive loss), and I don't yet understand even what the starting abilities do or how friendly fire works.
This game needs documentation.
Oh, and the initial areas might look open-world, but you can't leave the path. It's not obvious you can't leave the path until you try to leave the path, and you just can't.
Nightmare mode is thus far unforgiving but fair. Battles are made unnecessarily even more difficult by my chars ignoring orders given in tac cam which I've had to use extensively. Tac cam itself has some annoying issues, like zooming in on your characters each time you select them. This means to give orders to your entire team you have to click one, drag camera to enemies, click next, drag camera to enemies... ect. The tac cam itself feels ackward and if you like swapping in and out (as opposed to just unpausing in tac cam and staying in that view) you have to resect your character, realign the camera (it doesn't quite do it for you) and then come out of tac cam.
There's also some crazy bugs. Had a tutorial thing stuck on my screen forever... persisted through reloading, computer restart, ect. I had to remake my character... in that new file Cassandra did not give me the starting set of health potion she was supposed to give you. Great.
Saying all that I've extremely enjoyed my time in the game and say it was worth the wait 100%. Far far from perfect, of course, and there are a lot of annoyances. For example I can already tell the crafting (the actual process of putting the collected crafting items together) is going to get incredibly tedious. There's a video explaining why, and having messed with it myself I agree wholeheartedly. But they're just that; annoyances. The core game itself is incredibly fun and I'm enjoying the story so far, which has a nice prelude feeling to it where all the little tiny pieces add up to form a real plot. I know a lot of reviewers said the start pretty much sucked story wise, but I've read slower books so maybe I'm unique in that regard. Besides, Suikoden V had one of the darn slowest starts in existence and remains one of my favorite stories in gaming.
Yeah, I started a thread on this in the feedback section. In several of the dev streams it showed them assigning commands for multiple characters without the camera moving. They also mentioned in a few of the streams that there's an option whether the camera snaps to the character or not in tac cam. However, there seems to be no such option in the actual game. I was planning to play all combat in tac cam, but it will be very annoying without such an option.
Just getting started myself, but quite disappointed that the detailed tactics programming is gone. Did the devs not understand that this was one of the most engrossing features of the previous games? I love programming exactly what I want my characters to do and then watching it play out in battle. I don't want to micro-manage EVERY battle with the tactical view. I want to preset how everyone acts and then have that happen in real time.
The one I saw was when Varric pointed out that my (human mage) PC had a Free Marcher accent. I had three anwers to that, from ''wow, you're perceptive'' to ''no ****, genius''.
In mine Solas commented that my character is Dalish - after which Herald autoreplied with "what do you know about the Dalish?".
Solas said he 'crossed path' with them several times during his travels, and I had 3 options to reply to that. Really cool stuff. A small detail, but makes you so much more engaged in the banter.
What I have trouble is you have to hold a button for auto-attack and your character won't stay on enemy. So sometime I am slashing the air like a moron. I am getting better at it though.
No auto-attack (holding is no auto-attack) is the worst thing in otherwise very solid combat.
I played for like less than an hour, so I just fought several shades/wraiths
Nightmare is pretty challanging (and by challanging I mean enemies have a ton of HP (about a 1000-3000, but others have ~300, and can use barrier; while my autoattack deals 20 damage, and starting spells about 50) and hit quite hard. I expect it to get much worse, as this is merely a prologue.
The most positive suprise is that friendly fire is not broken. I repeat - it's not broken. It actually works quite well.
It makes one of the starting spells - chain lightning quite pretty bad unfortunately, because it deals friendly fire damage and has no indication of AOE, so my mage would frequently hit himself. I'm really hoping for some respec option after prologue.
I managed to perform one cross-class combo, largely by accident. Solas froze a shade with winter's grasp, and Varric shattered it with a Long Shot - seemed to deal roughly 3x more damage and broke 'frozen' status effect.
Graphics are amazing. Simple as that. I have not seen much, but what I have seen is beautiful. During an hour I played, I've perhaps seen similar variety in terrain as in entire DA2 (excluding DLCs). The art style is amazing. Clothing and armor is just superb, and so are faces. I have not expected to say this, but Cassandra looks beautiful in this game. It looks beautiful and runs decent (not fully fluid, but I have above 40 fps, apart from cutscenes most of the time - on everything high + ultra mesh and textures, without MSAA) on my old GTX 660. After NVidia releases new driver it should become even better. Unfortunately, cutscenes can stutter, especially at the beginning - probably because of sudden fps drop at from 45-50 to 30 :/.
Character creator is just superb. I'll actually return to it, because after playing for an hour I'm not fully satisfied with my Inquisitor. You can customize literally everything.
I was especially impressed with the eye color. In previous Bioware games there were usually just a few options - now you can choose pretty much any color you want.
I'm really liking the characters so far. Cassandra is aggresive and tries to dominate you from the very beginning (with Leliana mitigating her ) - but if you cooperate willingly she's visibly thrown completely of balance, and later you can actully stand up to her and she seems to respect you more for that.
Varric makes an excellent return. His humor is back, his sarcastic attitude is unchanged and it certainly seems that after being the best bro for Hawke, he may very well become the same for the Inquisitor. In those 30 minutes I had him in my party, every dialogue/banter line he has is golden.
I haven't really made up my mind about Solas yet - perhaps because he's a new character, while the other two appeared in DA2.
And one more thing. The limited potions and no healing is the best gameplay design decision that BioWare has ever made. Period.
Seriously - it's just excellent. It adds tension, it motivates you to take care in combat, it makes you feel like slaugthering your way through demons is actually hard and costs a lot of effort.
In general, I cannot wait till I return home to play some more.
Oh, and the last one, slightly amusing bit. In first fight I almost got my ass kicked, beause instead of pausing I was jumping around like crazy. Seems like pause was originally binded to Ctrl, and jump to Spacebar. I had to reverse that to actually be able to play 
.
A genius was responsible for the way snow sounds and the fact that if your staff hits a hanging light it makes a noise and swings!
I love Varric's Jokes 
Does the AoE-damage of 2 handed weapons do friendly fire?
My first impression is.... Cassandra and I wont get along very well and it is a darn long journey.... ah well. That girl has some serious issues! She disapproves of everything I do!!! 
Maybe it is some Orlesian way to attract attention from the opposite gender.
Overall, the game is awesome solid. Although I have been playing the character creation mainly.... for 6 hours 
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