Just finished the game, and loved it. On a dualcore PC no less!
The major issue I had was the balance of main missions to sidequests. I enjoyed most of them, but I think the game would be much better served if the development time for sidequests was halved, and a hefty act or two were added onto the main mission.
I love the sidequests, but the number of them is ludicrous. I mean, the Hinterlands alone would have required more manhours to build than the entire main story mission!
I'd have much prefered that all that effort went into another act or two - development time is identical.
Or even simpler - just make power actually matter, so doing the side missions is important to unlock the main story. I was never short on power - and ended the main story with over 100 spare - and I'm not an OCD completist and huge tracks of the Exalted Plains are left unexplored. It doesn't feel like a resource to be earned if you always have a ridiculous amount of it.
KyoZ, Laughing_Man, Grayvisions et 46 autres aiment ceci
Totally disagree. I love everything you can do in the game, I love exploring, taking screenshots, collecting stuff. I actually would like to see more of that.
SolVita, Sir Ulrich Von Lichenstien et VelvetStraitjacket aiment ceci
Fully agree. Like you said they should have made power matter more. Most side quests could be completely ignored and it wouldn't change anything, you don't even have to close all the rifts. I could skip most side quests and the world would be exactly the same in the end.
I will do one 100% complete play through, but after that I can't see me doing all the side quests again. I don't mind them being there though, they are fun for those that like it and totally optional for those that don't.
I will do one 100% complete play through, but after that I can't see me doing all the side quests again. I don't mind them being there though, they are fun for those that like it and totally optional for those that don't.
Side quests are good - you need sidequests in a RPG.
The main story quests(and companion quests) require more adjustment for choices, cinematics for events and character face close ups etc. They're very different in terms of design resources in comparison to side quests.
That being said, I did enjoy the main story quests a lot more than the random sidequests.
I'm not saying a lot of them aren't good - they are. But many of those will never be seen by most players.
I'd prefer a 2/3rds main to 1/3rd sidequest ratio, rather than 4/5s sidequest to 1/5th main.
I have no clue how long the main story is, though. Can't comment on it. I can't play the main story at the moment, actually. A bug causes conversations to freeze, and the only way out of it is to skip the dialogue - which means I am skipping important story bits...
Yeah, the game has 6 big story quests (maybe 8 if you account for the big variations in Act 1). It could easily have had 8 or 9 quests while cutting the more busywork side missions across all regions, and mabe axing a bit of the bigger areas like Hinterlands, Exalted Plains and Hissing Wastes.
I very much like the core model Inquisition used; long, involved and varied main quests gated by open world progress and backed with some interesting side-quests and some more completionist busywork. They just need to cut a lot of the busywork and invest that time elsewhere.
N7KnightSabre, Joe-Poe et Allotetraploid aiment ceci
I honestly thought the main story was a little weak. I mean the big twist
Spoiler
that your mark came from the Elder One
I'd figured out hours before it hit. When you compare it to all the detailed sidequests and lore and keep-capturing and stuff, it just...I don't know. It's not a bad main quest, but it could have been better.
I agree entirely. Too many sidequests, not enough main story.
This all over, there's what?
The Wrath of Heaven (prologue)
The Threat Remains,
In Hushed Whispers / Champions of the Just
3 at the start (one mutually exclusive, even if you can do part of the In Hushed Whispers anyway)
In Your Heart Shall Burn (Haven)
From Ashes (should this even count?)
So 1 'act 1 finale' with the From Ashes really not being a full quest per se.
Here Lies the Abyss,
Wicked Hearts and Wicked Eyes,
2 for Act 2, both pretty lengthy though, Wicked Eyes and Hearts gets a lot of praise.
Then you're at the finale really;
Pride Wrought,
Final Piece,
End Quest
So 3 total there.
So 7.5 quests in total, (8 if you exclude the exclusivity) so, someone mod the power requirements to 0, and speed run it, I'd be very curious if it hits 10-20 hours minus cutscenes.
Don't get me wrong, the main quests are absolutely fantastic in my opinion.
I really liked the Exalted Plains and Emerald Graves, both of which were completely side quests. I would have liked one or two more main quests because they were so effing good, though.
I actually like the balance. The main quest with a few side missions is around the length of a Mass Effect game, but if you feel like it you can spend hours upon hours doing additional activities, much of which is actually very well made.
3 at the start (one mutually exclusive, even if you can do part of the In Hushed Whispers anyway)
In Your Heart Shall Burn (Haven)
From Ashes (should this even count?)
So 1 'act 1 finale' with the From Ashes really not being a full quest per se.
Here Lies the Abyss,
Wicked Hearts and Wicked Eyes,
2 for Act 2, both pretty lengthy though, Wicked Eyes and Hearts gets a lot of praise.
Then you're at the finale really;
Pride Wrought,
Final Piece,
End Quest
So 3 total there.
So 7.5 quests in total, (8 if you exclude the exclusivity) so, someone mod the power requirements to 0, and speed run it, I'd be very curious if it hits 10-20 hours minus cutscenes.
Don't get me wrong, the main quests are absolutely fantastic in my opinion.
That's 8 main story quests, compared to what feels like 80 side quests (more than half of which are either fetch quests or kill quests).
A modern Intel dualcore - we have a workaround using an ancient set of drivers that work if it also has an internal graphics chipset onboard. They're outlined elsewhere on this board.
I don't agree, but I do think if the meat of the game is going to be building up your forces via side quests then at some point we need to see the effect of our forces. There needs to be a moment like at the end of Origins where our soldiers march and how prepared they look is entirely dependent on the things you've done. The fact that I have taken over every keep in the game and it isn't at reflected in the story is ridiculous.
Quick disclaimer: I present a lot of things here like facts, but please just mentally affix "In my opinion" to all statements made, as that was my intention. Moving on.
I agree. Now, I haven't actually played the main story past meeting Varric's special ally due to the voice switch bug, so I won't be talking about that, but from what I hear, you're absolutely right. However, even among the side parts of the game there could be hacking out and redirected development as well. There need to be less sidequests so the ones that do exist can be more interesting. A couple of sidequests with actual choices would have been nice, for example. Outside of the main story the only choices I can think of are what to do with companions. And while I love companion sidequests, they shouldn't be the only engaging ones. And I wish they'd put more work into having the Inquisitor actually building the Inquisition rather than performing random favours for strangers. There should have been less fetching rings and delivering flowers and more effort put into expanding reach and influence. Two things off the top of my head that could have been done:
First, fleshing out keep capturing. It's incredibly basic and underwhelming in its current form (approach door. break door. kill a couple groups of baddies. raise flag. ). They should have made capturing keeps a long process with lots of buildup. A zone-wide quest chain (and perhaps some operations) aimed at weakening the enemy's forces and position before a final assault using your party of four and other agents of the Inquisition (perhaps with assignments similar to the ME2 suicide mission, except without the suicide). Or something like that. Just anything that's actually interesting. Then once the keep is taken some more quests could be opened up that are aimed at expanding the Inquisition's reach in that region (The Western Approach sort of did this with the Tevinter ruins after taking the keep.) Admittedly, I haven't done the Crestwood keep yet, so perhaps it's better than the other two, but my point stands.
Second, adding in-universe benefits to finding places like Dirthamen's temple or the Paragon's tomb in Hissing Wastes. Magical knowledge, old artifacts, prestige, allies, anything really. In the temple, I got a purple dagger. The Paragon's tomb gave me a master rune schematic. I mean, I learn that the venatori are searching for the tomb of a legendary runecrafter said to have created weapons of mass destrucion. So I go trudging through a god-forsaken desert hunting down key fragments to open it, manage to track down the tomb using an archaeologist's journal, and kill the dragon guarding it, and all that's there is a master demon slaying (I think) rune? No ancient dwarven artifacts to take back and study? No opportunity to spread the knowledge of this dwarven-surface city? I wasn't expecting uber-hax lewtz, but what was the point of this entire zone? Ostensibly it was to stop the venatori from whatever shenanigans they had planned, but after learning that all they had to gain was that rune schematic, I'm left wondering why this zone existed from a gameplay perspective.
Which I guess is part of my problem with how the content in the game is designed and distributed. Presumably the "point" of the zone is exploration and discovery, and finding the tomb was to be its own reward. Personally, I'm not in to that. That's Bethesda's wheelhouse (and there's a reason I didn't enjoy Skyrim) and rather than try to emulate, perhaps Bioware should really just stick to what they do best: characters and story. I mean, I'd be fine with them expanding the focus of their game, if it didn't affect the core Bioware experience, but in this case I feel like it did.
Anyway, to expand upon my point, I've thought of an area that did it right (mostly) and an area that did it wrong: Emprise du Lion and Exalted Plains, respectively. Obviously zone spoilers follow:
Spoiler
Emprise du Lion. A series of steps designed to push back the enemy and expand the Inquisition's position, then take their quarry from them while rescuing the locals and building goodwill, then storm the red templar's keep and claim it. After that, expand reach by rebuilding the bridge in order to capture guard towers across the canyon and finally, slay the dragons that threaten the area. It's well designed, even though it has its problems with execution. Mainly in that, taken together, all the aspects feel less like an epic journey to claim a region and more like a series of unconnected quests. A few conversations along the way with the locals or members of the Inquisition would have gone a long way to making it feel more substantial. But in the end, there's still the feeling that you actually accomplished something in the name of the Inquisition.
Meanwhile, in the Exalted Plains, you run around slaying arcane horrors and burning ritual site full of corpses in order to stem the tide of the undead and reclaim the ramparts for the Orlesian military to move in. The culmination of the zone is either when you fight the man who performed the rituals, when you rescue Gaspard's soldiers, or when you fight through undead and lasers to rescue Celene's soldiers from the elven ruins. But either way, what's the point? For one thing, we never actually find out who the baddy was or why he did what he did. (Presumably he was a freedman, but why resort to raising the dead? Where did he learn to do this on such a massive scale? Throw some story at me Bioware! Make me hate the man, or sympathise with him even while condemning his actions.) Second of all, the ruins themselves. I would have thought there might have been an operation to claim or study the ancient Elven defenses and install a similar system at Skyhold or something. Instead, once the immediate danger of it is gone, nobody seems to care very much that there's an elven deathbeam in the belltower...
Anyway, that's my exceeding long, rambly, somewhat crazy rant on this subject. I guess what I really want is less pointless running around and artificial time-sinks designed to make the game seem bigger, and more story. Quality, not quantity. Parts of Inquisition suffer from the "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" condition like certain open world games, and I hope the trend doesn't continue for Dragon Age.
TL;DR: I agree.
Judas Bock, TheRevanchist, Bekkael et 7 autres aiment ceci
I think the format this game has could actually be the future of Bioware RPGs, but like OP says, and I agree, if they cut out half the side content to put more effort into the actual story and even flesh out companion characters with more substance, then it would've been a better game.
The parts that makes playing DA:I great are IMO.
- The main missions are well-done and fun to play
- Hanging out at Skyhold, talking to companions
And the parts that are less awesome involve:
-. Doing collection sidequests
- Mindlessly ticking boxes in the Journal by killing X number of Y people, finding some unimportant NPCs husband who, like her, has no backstory and no story to tell.
Unfortunately the least favorite parts of inquisition take up more than half the game time. It's a good thing that the thing has a" better than the sum of its parts" feel to it, because fair and square I would be inclined to call the game a 5/10 when half the time playing the game is spent doing repetitive and boring stuff.
The problem is not that there are too many side quests, but that they are too often too basic and lack story and are reduced what their gameplay objectives are. It feels counter intuitive for a story-focuses RPG.
TheRevanchist, Allotetraploid, Victoriaoke et 1 autre aiment ceci
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). They should have made capturing keeps a long process with lots of buildup. A zone-wide quest chain (and perhaps some operations) aimed at weakening the enemy's forces and position before a final assault using your party of four and other agents of the Inquisition (perhaps with assignments similar to the ME2 suicide mission, except without the suicide). Or something like that. Just anything that's actually interesting. Then once the keep is taken some more quests could be opened up that are aimed at expanding the Inquisition's reach in that region (The Western Approach sort of did this with the Tevinter ruins after taking the keep.) Admittedly, I haven't done the Crestwood keep yet, so perhaps it's better than the other two, but my point stands. 
