As the title says, here is my review of dragon age inquisition on pc after 80h and completing what seemed to me like every single quest available in the game. Bear with me this could be long (but there is a gift at the end
)
Technical:
My rig is a gtx780, i7-4790 23,60GHz and 8GB RAM. The game ran smoothly. I have the great chance of having a pretty quick internet connection and from the download till playing the game I had little to no problem with the game. At later stages of the game I had some game loading that was quite long but nothing too dramatic. What was a little disturbing was the environment not appearing in skyhold...for a bit. I loaded a session and found skyhold to be an empty environment, only the stuff I could interact with appeared on screen and after a few more seconds everything suddenly popped into existence.
As for the graphics, goodness gracious have they made a great job. The frostbite 3 really shows well in this game. The FX are great and at times I just stopped and watched the world "happen" around me. These are perhaps not the best graphics in the gaming world to this day, but they certainly are among the better ones. Characters are also well rendered and their faces seem natural (if you don't look too close...damn uncanny valley)
Gameplay:
Overall not impressed too much. I played on normal as I normally do when on my first playthrough (little bits of hard and nightmare to try them out). The tactical cam was a little too close to the ground and the pc controls were a little wonky to say the least. I won't add to the arguments of other PC players on this forum and I invite you to search for their arguments if you're wondering. Remapping is a must though.
On the other hand I loved the pace of combats, the fact that there was no healing and how you need to learn to synergize your team in order for them not to die (looking at you dual wield rogue). The tactics were a little unusual and tinkering too much with them led to disastrous results. The automatic AI is not "too" bad if you're not playing on higher difficulty. Blackwall and Cassandra did marvelously well bringing up their guard constantly and mages barrier if you put on high priority the right skills (only tinkering you should be doing really).
Crafting and resource gathering were great although I must admit that weapon crafting sometimes seemed less important than armor crafting as of efficiency. Upgrading your potions is not something you should neglect. Gathering power and influence was a little bit weird at times. You acquire power really quickly and at the end of my game I had about 280 power and nowhere to spend it. Influence is really difficult to get at the start, but it gets easier once you go dragon hunting
. You can also buy some in skyhold so people who are not too interested in side questing but have a lot of money can invest in that.
Characters and quests
I think the characters were really well written. I say this with the exception of Blackwall and Iron Bull who were a bit boring in my opinion. To be fair Iron Bull had these really funny lines, but that doesn't make me like him, he felt like comic relief. Blackwall was on the other hand really not that fun (except that he tanks like a champ). Apart from those two characters, the others felt really fleshed out. I hate Sera for being so stubborn about religion and traditions and stuff, but that's good because I actually "dislike" her personality. She is believable to me as are the other characters.
Side note here for some characters that appear:
When talking about quests, I would like to first talk about the side quests, the main quest and then a little bit about how Thedas is depicted:
Side quests all made sense. Every single side quest in this game (except for the collection ones perhaps) were related to the main plot more or less loosely. In previous games, side quests weren't meaningful to the main plot at all! Do you need to assassinate people to end the Blight? No, you're really just a greedy bastard
I'm an avid reader and the quest descriptions were nicely written, made sense and helped convey the scope of what happened (more on this in the Thedas part). Actually the side quests became so cool and important in my opinion that they started overshadowing the main quest in some ways. I completed every side quest and war table mission before going into "Wicked eyes and wicked heart" and it was a marvelous ride. When quests are accomplished, the world actually changes. The farms in the Hinterlands actually feel safe, the crossroads are now clear of mage/templar bickering, the storm coast is roaming with mercenaries that work for you. Closing rifts, placing camps, capturing strongholds actually make a difference. I regret not all the stuff that was presented during the alpha made it to the game (stronghold customization for example) but it's okay because there's still a ton of stuff to do. What was missing from these quests were the sense that I could lose my stuff. I was in no danger whatsoever of having my stronghold attacked and doing these quests didn't have the significant impact on the story that I was waiting for (or maybe I didn't notice. The exception being Samson's armor)
The main quest was a little weird to me. Might be because I finished it real quick, but it felt kind of short. The main villain was also not very...savory to me. I'm taking the example of other vilains here to illustrate : Yagami Light from Death Note manga or Voldemort from Harry Potter or Irenicus in Balgur's Gate 2. These three characters have something every villain needs in order to become a villain everybody loves to hate. They have this moral code or philosophy that any of us (normal/ not too evil people) could have, but they somehow twist it and bring it to the heights we know. What is amazing about these characters and their story is that along the way to getting to their goal, they lose anything that makes them human, or rather they sacrifice it on the altar of their divine idea of an ideal world. And that's what makes a villain amazing, they break the shackles that would normally restrain us, go mad with the ambition of the goal and cast aside everything, tear down everything and seem unstoppable. that's scary and totally badass. I found Samson more interesting than Corypheus in the end.
I'm going to use my last idea to introduce my review of Thedas itself. Something weird happened with Thedas after DA:O. It lost that something that made me feel that Thedas was a dangerous and fantastic world. Dread just dissapeared. Admitedly the villains in Dragon age have seldom been fleshed out (with the exception of the architect) but what they brought with them into the universe was more dread over an already dreadful setting. I explain myself. In DA:O the female city elf origin was flipping scary to me, how could they do that? Hespith's poem made me cringe when I realized what it was about, Leandra's fate in DA:II was like "wtf?! I never saw this coming!! No way! The sister, the brother and now THIS!?!?!?". I remember I had plenty of those moments in mass effect (the trilogy) as well. Thedas in DA:I is definitely missing some of thatI I want to feel maybe that if I was a random normal bloke in there I could actually well die because of...reasons. The Witcher series admittedly (and I hate to admit it) does it better.
This article http://tay.kotaku.co...fant-1662330835 makes some points on this matter, but as I understand or rather feel about this is that this game needed to be politically correct and set an example as to how certain themes needed to be treated in games (sexuality, violence, power over others etc..) and in that maybe the team of Bioware just decided they'd go this way or got bullied into doing that or a bit of both.
I'm not here to try get more mysoginy in games or anything like that or advocating it. I think it's just plain stupid. I'm just wondering why stuff like that cannot be included in game in an elegant way (just the way it was done in DA:O). It could be unhealthy admitedly; feeding that need to see violence everywhere but weirdly (and that says a lot about how we see the world) it's something needed to make you feel like something is real. In game of thrones (A song of Ice and Fire more accurately as I am speaking here of the books and not the show) shows this violence to the extreme sometimes, but this brutality and reality is what makes the characters believable and how they manipulate each other. I have hardly to never seen such strong female characters in ANY fantasy set. They are not strong physically (not all of them), they usually don't die on battlefields, they sometimes use their bodies to get something, they sometimes are used to get something but the extend of their influence on the world is on par if not far greater than most unsuspecting men. How is that not possible in this game? There is no necessity of making female characters weaker than men to attain dread in my opinion. Women are as strong as men in dragon age, yet only women get turned into broodmothers, only women wield the power of Divine, sister Petrice's plans caused me dread, the Qunari attack caused dread...why can't I feel it in this game (except for those few first hours)?
You can find some of this dread in game if you look for it. If you look for codex entries, letters, scrapped paper, you'll find tales of a family that eventually got caught up with the civil war and died. Demons infesting people and killing stuff, but it still feels too clean.
Summary
Overall I was very satisfied with this game. The side quests and gaining power felt great. The companions and advisors were a delight to have on this 80h trip and the main quest was mostly alright. A few hiccups here and there in a world that felt too "clean" in the end.
But hell, count me in for more of this stuff!!!! (DA:I new playthrough and in a distant future Mass Effect 4 and DA:4)
And the gift!! Here is a potato






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