71 réponses à ce sujet

[thats1evildude]

He never made it out of the Hinterlands.

[frankf43]

He never made it out of the Hinterlands.

There is more after the Hinterlands? What's it Like? I've only played about 160 hours with my main so I'm still polishing off those side quests. 

[lynroy]

He never made it out of the Hinterlands.

I'll add their name to the memorial wall.

[CronoDragoon]

Inquisition gating main story progress through Power is an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, do it and players uninterested in side content feel hindered as the OP said. Don't do it, and the whole narrative conceit of the Inquisition gaining enough influence and notoriet in the region to engage in the main quests falls apart. Personally, I prefer the way Inquisition does it: the side quests are there to tell the story of how the Inquisition becomes a force to be wreckoned with, such that when Gaspard invites you to the Winter Palace there is logical weight behind why he would do so.

[AnimalBoy]

I didn't mind it so much the first time but when playing the game for a second time made doing the side quests a chore.

[Nefla]

Inquisition gating main story progress through Power is an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, do it and players uninterested in side content feel hindered as the OP said. Don't do it, and the whole narrative conceit of the Inquisition gaining enough influence and notoriet in the region to engage in the main quests falls apart. Personally, I prefer the way Inquisition does it: the side quests are there to tell the story of how the Inquisition becomes a force to be wreckoned with, such that when Gaspard invites you to the Winter Palace there is logical weight behind why he would do so.

They could have made sidequests fun, relevant, and interesting so that people would want to do them. Even giving unique armor sets or something similar would have provided incentive. Generally I LOVE sidequests, DA:I is one of the very few exceptions because of how dull they are. The only non-companion sidequest I found the least bit interesting was the Crestwood one. Not having the power requirements wouldn't deter the people who like those sidequests/rift closing/whatever from doing it anyway but forcing people who are uninterested gives them a negative experience.

 

From a story perspective, only a few of those quests make sense for giving the Inquisition actual influence and those are things like closing rifts, capturing keeps, killing dragons, saving the crestwood region and so on. Things that are big and would get the attention of people not directly involved. Finding someone's lost sheep or collecting elfroot for a healer or pitching a tent or finding a lost ring, etc...are nice things to do but those wouldn't make your organization powerful or influential. The stuff described in the wartable missions would have been more suitable for the inquisitor and the herb collecting and ring finding would have been better for wartable missions (have the grunts do the grunt work) sadly they didn't have the resources left for substantial side quests.

[CronoDragoon]

The could have made sidequests fun, relevant, and interesting so that people would want to do them. Even giving unique armor sets or something similar would have provided incentive. Generally I LOVE sidequests, DA:I is one of the very few exceptions because of how dull they are. The only non-companion sidequest I found the least bit interesting was the Crestwood one. Not having the power requirements wouldn't deter the people who like those sidequests/rift closing/whatever from doing it anyway but forcing people who are uninterested gives them a negative experience.

 

From a story perspective, only a few of those quests make sense for giving the Inquisition actual influence and those are things like closing rifts, capturing keeps, killing dragons, saving the crestwood region and so on. Things that are big and would get the attention of people not directly involved. Finding someone's lost sheep or collecting elfroot for a healer or pitching a tent or finding a lost ring, etc...are nice things to do but those wouldn't make your organization powerful or influential. The stuff described in the wartable missions would have been more suitable for the inquisitor and the herb collecting and ring finding would have been better for wartable missions (have the grunts do the grunt work) sadly they didn't have the resources left for substantial side quests.

 

I found almost every quest relevant to the Inquisition's influence. The Hinterlands has most of the seemingly trivial fetch quests in the game, but that's a product of how little influence the Inquisition has at that time. They need grassroots influence to get their name in the mouths of the common folk so the elite begin to pay attention to them. Additionally, those trivial tasks aren't required to build Power, and in fact most of the "fetch quest" style quests don't give Power at all.

 

Having said that, I completely agree with your criticism that BioWare thought it would be sufficient to only give many side quests enough context to make them tie into building the Inquisition, but not enough for them to be interesting in their own right, as a small story in the world. It would have been far preferable to instead chain all those side quests together into the progression of one long quest that tells a good story about the zone. Their most successful zones do exactly that (Crestwood and the Frostback Basin).

[Nefla]

I found almost every quest relevant to the Inquisition's influence. The Hinterlands has most of the seemingly trivial fetch quests in the game, but that's a product of how little influence the Inquisition has at that time. They need grassroots influence to get their name in the mouths of the common folk so the elite begin to pay attention to them. Additionally, those trivial tasks aren't required to build Power, and in fact most of the "fetch quest" style quests don't give Power at all.

 

Having said that, I completely agree with your criticism that BioWare thought it would be sufficient to only give many side quests enough context to make them tie into building the Inquisition, but not enough for them to be interesting in their own right, as a small story in the world. It would have been far preferable to instead chain all those side quests together into the progression of one long quest that tells a good story about the zone. Their most successful zones do exactly that (Crestwood and the Frostback Basin).

The ones that didn't give power gave influence though and something like finding a ring or doing something a note on the ground tells you to (especially when there are no actual people involved to witness it) wouldn't realistically do either. It would have been cool if like you said those small quests chained together into something relevant and interesting. I like how it's done in SWtOR. Each planet has a main planetary questline (with lots of dialogue and some choices to make) that you can do as you're doing your class quest.

[GoldenGail3]

I agree with you OP. Filler Quests suck eggs!

[ModernAcademic]

So I'm about 10 hours into the game and enjoying it. However I'm on that daddy family time and my game time is really limited these days. With that said I really wanted to forgo the side quests and focus the main quest line due to lack of time. I feel like I'm hindered from playing the way I want to because of the "get 15 power then talk to the Templars/mages" stuff. What do you guys think?

 

Made a long rant about this a few days ago: http://forum.bioware...re-hinterlands/

 

I feel you pain, bro.

[Novos]

This is one of the biggest problems of open world games. And DAI is making it much more pronounced due to its weak overall balance...

Let me tell you what i mean :

For example in music; you first etablish tonality which is the center of your song. Once your listeners have a grasp at what your foundation is through the introduction of the key and the scale, you can move along with notes and progression creating tension(like a journey) followed by a return to your key later creating relief(conclusion). This cycle of tension and relief is the key element of making great music...

But if you spend too much time without a return to your key note; your listeners will struggle to keep up and eventually loose interest as they won' t be able to sense what your tonal center is anymore. Therefore if you don't have a certain artistic goal of creating confusion, anxiety etc. spending too much time away of your tonal center is not a smart way of making music.

While any form of narrative follows a similar pattern; in the case of DAI the tonal center is the main plot. But what DAI does in this regard is like creating a piece of music with lots random notes(within or out of the scale) scattered all around the song for no apparent purpose or reason. The overwhelming amount of pointless side activities and quests seem to just create confusion and detachment on the side of the gamers.

The correct way of doing this is again can be explained just like we see in music. For example like a solo performance... We see things similar to this in the likes of open worlds as Gta, Just Cause etc. ability to do crazy things and stunts while enjoying absurd ragdoll physics and such... This game has none of it. Arguably it may not be suitable for a DA game but still a better choice and a worthy option to explore mechanics suitable for a game like this. And no; jumping around rocks to reach a certain spot, or looking through some device to solve puzzles does not count...

Another way is again like modulation in music. A brief period of key transition. Like a story within a story... A brief, refreshing journey somehow tied to the plot in the means of explaining certain characters, conflicts or events ongoing within the world not necessarily tied to the plot etc... This game has some of this but not on a comparable level against the side activities we complain. Witcher 3 is a game highly praised by this in 2015. DAO has lots of it. Even DA2 has much more of it than Inquisition...

What is the point in creating content not to be experienced ? "Get out of Hinterlands", "Only do the necessary amount of side quests" are not strong arguments. You see; most of the people do not game with expert guides and walkthroughs. They just try to experience what that world has to offer based on what they have been told during pre-launch or their past experiences on the franchise only to find out that it just offers literally a couple of more clicks, instead of an experience. This is what creates the confusion and the huge amount of criticism.

[AlanC9]

It's not really clear from that what the advantage of the GTA approach is, though that probably has something to do with the GTA games not holding my attention.

[ticklefist]

I waited for the GOTY of this game and still sat on the fence for a couple months once it game out. All because people pissed and moaned about side quests. 

 

Well I'm here now, having a lot of fun with them.

[Nixou]

You know, right now I'm playing through Xenoblade Chronicles X (note to people who might be interested: if you felt overwhelmed by the Hinterlands, Do Not touch this game: when the old guard of Japanese game design decides to do Open World RPGs, they Don't-****-Around "So you kids think you sandboxes are impressive: here's our virtual Rub' al Khali: You're very welcome") and the one thing that frustrates me the most in this game is that so few quests are mandatory to progress through the main story:

 

XCX is gameplay-wise very similar to Inquisition: instead of "Power" you need to increase your "Survey Rate" (that's the whole point of the game: your character belongs to a team of explorers cartographying the new world) by reporting new locations, finding interesting artifacts and completing certain sidequests in order to unlock the main quests.

Except that if you are a rather completionist player like me, you end up with a lot more than needed to advance the plot: for instance, to access the Chapter 10 of the main story, you need to have surveyed at least 15% of Sylvalum (the game's fourth main zone/landmass): in my case, I'm already at nearly 45% of the region's survey: so, just like completionist players end up with way more Power than needed to advance the main story in Inquisition, they'll end up with survey rates way higher than needed to advance XCX's main plot.

 

But that's were the Bioware games differ from their Monolith Soft's counterparts: the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages have the completionist-friendly hard and nightmare modes where the main quest remains challenging even if all the available side quests are done. In fact, unless you are a difficulty fetichist doing a low-level run, these difficulty modes turn side-quests into mandatory parts of the game: here the completionist play-style feels rewarding because the experience, money, material, etc... obtained in the side-quests is then invested to make the main story's boss and dungeons manageable. In Xenoblade, on the other hand, once you've completed all the (often very challenging) side-quests available and it's time to tackle the next main quest, you face the infamous "ludonarrative dissonance" where the story presents the events unfolding as dangerous, life threatening situations the protagonist barely survive while gameplay-wise you easily breeze through everything the main quest throws at you.

 

So while I consider the latest Xeno to be for the most part superior to Inquisition, it sorely lacks a hard-mode. Which links back to what I was saying earlier: the well-designed multiple difficulty modes, which allow their games to accommodate both casual and completionist players are one of Bioware's oft ignored strongest point.

[Mountain]

I live for the side quests.

[GoldenGail3]

I live for the side quests.

.... Your the first person I've ever heard say that....

[Sylvius the Mad]

.... Your the first person I've ever heard say that....

I would rather we not be able to tell which quests were sidequests and which advance the plot.

That would render this whole discussion moot.

[Catilina]

.... Your the first person I've ever heard say that....

I like the side quests, i dont like just the "filler" quests: gathering, etc.

[Wulfram]

I would rather we not be able to tell which quests were sidequests and which advance the plot.

That would render this whole discussion moot.

No it wouldn't. It would effectively force you to do side quests, which would be annoying.

[Sylvius the Mad]

No it wouldn't. It would effectively force you to do side quests, which would be annoying.

They wouldn't be sidequests. They'd just be quests. The main plot should not be visible from inside the game.

Calling some quests sidequests doesn't even make sense from an in-character perspective.

[AlanC9]

It depends on presentation. Let the player make a reasonable decision about what to do next based on evidence.

In DAI, Crestwood could have been presented as just another area having something to do with Cory, like the Hissing Wastes or Emprise du Lion. As opposed to, for instance, the Fallow Mire, which appears to have no connection to the main plot, and really doesn't. Of course, an astute -- metagaming? -- player would realize that the area Hawke was involved in would be likely to advance the main plot. WEWH might as well stay flagged as a main quest since the outcome is known to be critical after IYHSB.

In ME1 the three initial leads could have been put among several others. The problem there is that most of the sidequests aren't plausibly related to Saren -- Armstrong Nebula and maybe Cerberus are exceptions -- but that's something you'd write differently if the game was structured differently.

[Wulfram]

I think the distinction between "recruit the mage rebellion to fight Corypheus" and "find a lost goat" is fairly evident even from an in character perspective.

[AlanC9]

I think the distinction between "recruit the mage rebellion to fight Corypheus" and "find a lost goat" is fairly evident even from an in character perspective.

Sure, but that's an argument against flagging particular quests as the main plot.

[Elhanan]

As I recall, most side content is optional. There are a few ways to gather XP, gold, Power, etc; select the ones that are appealing and avoid those which appear annoying. Easy Peasy!

And if one tires of one environment, others are available. Travel elsewhere, and explore!

[Wulfram]

Sure, but that's an argument against flagging particular quests as the main plot.

I guess you're right.

The real problem is if the goat is actually Corypheus and thus you need to find it to keep the plot going. If you don't mark it as a main quest, the player may skip it and be confused and frustrated as to how to get things going.

People have different amount of time they're willing to spend completing a game, obfuscating how to preceed to the end limits the amount of control you have over the time you spend on it.

Not a problem if you're Sylvius and don't care about reaching the official end, I guess, but otherwise it can be.