Will be doing my utmost best to not mention any spoilers throughout this =)
First i apologies for any poor structure and this chunk of text
Please keep in mind this is all my subjective opinion and i make no claims that its anything but, of course there will be people who disagree about points i've made and i welcome people to comment on it, please just try to keep things constructive and friendly.
So i finished the game clocking in a time of 62 hours
(i had left 2 zones basically untouched, 2 half done and about 5 dragons to kill, along with some of the collectibles)
I will say that i was certainly impressed with this game and felt that it was certainly a worthwhile purchase and i feel like it's defiantly Bioware moving in the right direction.
Pro's:
.The game, on my PC looked absolutely fantastic, really really did... the lighting was spectacular, nice draw distances and the combat looked amazing, some of those mage spells where just beautiful to behold. I have heard that some people have had some major problems running this game on PC.. and i will admit there was the occasional stutter, i only had 1 crash over the course of my playtime, certainly wasn't a massive problem.
.The world... WOW... to me.. it felt like Bioware were trying to massively overcompensate for how people saw DA2 as being too linear and repetitive. I entered Hinterlands and thought. 'wow this is big! this'll probably be the largest area in the game, start big!'. But no, the game just kept on piling on large zone after large zone..with a variety of environments. Deserts, Forest, foothills, rainy coastlines to name just some. However in a few of the zones, especially those that where heavy in hills/mountains navigation become a real pain in the arse and turned into a game of wondering which steep rock climbs i could jump up.
.The combat for me... was a constant enjoyment, i have felt that in many Bioware games... the combat was just something i did to get from one interesting story moment to another.. And i wouldn't recommend friends bioware games FOR the combat. But in this i went out of my way to get into fights. I was very hesitant as to the removal of healing spells and limited potions however the game provides characters that should be tanky plenty of ways to stay up in even the longest fights and for me addressed an issue i've had with some DA games in that non-tanky characters could still handle long fights by just glugging twenty potions, here i actually took care to position my squishier characters so that they could avoid damage. I also felt that there was a suitable range of abilities and never felt like i was to restricted. Although really stupid spikes in mob health lead to occasions where in a zone that was 99% level 8, a certain fade rift would crank out level 12 demons, with no way of knowing until they were half way through munching your face off.
.Skyhold and how it played into the game was actually more than i had initially hoped for, the size of the place and the way it develops truly does make it feel like a bastion of your power and the extent of customization does make it feel more personnel towards you. This feeds into one of the games biggest strong points, Inquisition i found expertly found a way to make me feel like i was building up a mighty organisation and that it had an IMPACT in the world.. constant expansion of keeps and outposts put clear visual reminders as to your progress and seeing inquisition troops stationed at the various towns you help makes it all the better
Cons:
.The main story and the villain... without spoiling anything i will say, i felt that the main story of inquisition was, to be putting it mildly, weak. There were no real surprises here and things played out exactly as how i thought it would (with the exception to the masquerade mission, which i felt was an amazing change of pace and really well done).
I strongly remember Bioware claiming that the main story would take around 50 hours to complete with another 50 hours of side-content. While i can agree that i can see 100 hours being put into this game the split is faaaar less even. I would say that doing ONLY what is necessary to progress the story would take.. 15-20 hours maximum. With only a surprisingly small amount of missions that were just story, it doesn't have the time to try and build a big over arching narrative, this is further let down by a collection of fairly weak villains.
Antagonist's are slotted in for every new story mission without much detail to be beaten down only to be subbed in for another of the Big Bad's henchmen. With the overall enemy being.. uninteresting, while i partially blame this on him having further characterization outside the game, he just did nothing surprising, was in no way relateable and just felt like a carbon-cut bad guy wanting to do bad guy things with a really great recruitment policy.
.Companions and romances i felt were not done half as well as they have been in other DA games, (i felt much better than ME3 did and the little conversations you could have with them). With the removal of set 'banter initiation' points and the open world you explore meant that in the field party talk was quite scarce and worst of all. I just never felt my team 'bond'. In other Dragon Age games you felt like your team became this close knit squad. Wynne knitting Allistair socks, Varric giving Merril that ball of twine.. and her wanting to return it 3 years later, that never really happened, 90% of conversations i heard where mainly snarky/sarcastic comments to each other and never really developed beyond that.
Romance arcs, i honestly felt were half done, what i honestly anticipated to be half way through my romance with Cassandra actually turned out to be the final cut-scene conversation we would have until the final mission and videos i have seen of other romances give me the same impression. I thought that you would develop a romance and then at least a couple conversations would then lead on from that. Instead i would return to Cassandra every time i got into Skyhold wanting to continue this arc before finding out it was already finished, which kind of left me abit sore seeing as how Bioware are generally quite good at this sort of area. An example of this is that one of the characters (no spoilers) goes though i will admit a really surprising reveal.. and then... i had 1 30 second conversation with them upon returning to skyhold and that was it. There were a couple exceptions to this, the advisers were a lot more fleshed out than i feared they would be and hats off the Bioware on the inclusion and portrayal of a transgender character that i felt wasn't shoe-horned in or exploited.
.Certain quest designs felt really archaic and abit silly... feeling more like MMO quests than something i'd imagine from Bioware, quests like 'fetch 10 ram meat', or 'get 3 bear hides' just seemed like tastless filling, and i really hoped that people weren't being discouraged by entering the Hinterlands and feeling they had to 'do everything' in that zone and just becoming bored of the game.
Closing comments
Bioware certainly put the time and effort they felt was needed into making this game and it certainly shows, massive beautiful areas are there to be explored, supported by what i felt to be a really meaty and interesting combat system
This is a game about the world you inhabit and not the people, which is something of a shift of focus for Bioware although a fairly weak and overall short main storyline do bring the game down however.
I've always said to my friends. you want an RPG with good characters and story? go to Bioware. But for this game i just cannot say that either are delivered there.
To anyone who hasn't bought this game yet. Play it for the world not for the narrative
Retour en haut
