First things first, I loved DA:O despite being full of clinches - I swear it, I will buy the Bioware team a cask of beer if you produce a good emotionally involving RPG in which we do NOT save the world. DA:2 was underwhelming partly due ugly graphical engine and reuse of locations, partly of a whole list of issues I won't even bother to mention here.
Anyway back to the topic. The game doesn't feel right in terms of controls, whatever combat or general movement wise. I'm 77 hours in ( or 70 hours...more about this later ), PC playthrough, level 15, "hard" ( new normal ? ) difficulty. I just acquired my reaver specialisation and it suddenly hit me. The first word which comes to my mind when trying to describe my DA:I problems is: clunky. Clunkiness is extremely common in DA:I.
1. Camera.
First the camera control, especially in tactical mode is clunky at best. I can't count how many times I fought more with the position of the camera more the enemies on the screen.
2. Object interactions & orders.
The same applies to interactions with objects. Rifts placed too high to reach. Sending AI to revive a party member / interact with a rift to discover that AI decides to go back to fight and ignore the task it was given. And no, AI wasn't under attack and the order was placed in the tactical mode. Annoyingly enough you HAVE to be close to objects to interact with them as the AI isn't smart enough to do it by itself, whatever it's loot, crafting resources or other interactive objects. BTW what's up with "accidental" attack execution while trying to loot something ?!
3. Hit boxes & melee combat.
Probably the main reason why instead of enjoying the game I'm spending time writing this wall of text.
A perfect example is combat with big creatures ( not human size hit, collision box) like bears, wyverns, spiders etc. but affects other enemies too, especially in tight groups and/or spaces. While for ranged characters this isn't a problem, melee experience is full of frustrations. At first I was laughing when I saw my AI and enemies circle jerk around each other while failing to land a hit, then it turned into realisation that's yet another clunky feature which kills a lot of my fun.
4. Hit boxes & melee combat & reaver experience ( to some degree ANY close combat melee build )
I got my reaver specialisation and all hell broke loose. I realised that Dragon Rage skill the main damage dealer of this specialisation requires from you to manually spam it ( unlike auto-attack ) AND make sure you are in range of whatever you are trying to hit. For maximum effectiveness you are supposed to combine it with the Ring of Pain which in 4 seconds prevents you from using Devour which is the optimal finisher for Dragon Rage combo. Try to do it all in the same time while trying to stay in range of circle jerking enemies with constantly colliding hit boxes and weird movement animations ( good luck reading them to determine if you are under attack ).
Oh yeah and don't forget you have three other inept AI controlled party members most likely busy falling off a cliff while using Charging Bull, Fade Shift or Evade or if you are lucky burning through their stamina/mana without thinking about combos. At this point I feel like going back 7 hours back through my save games ( luckly I have some ) and changing my class specialisation as I feel reaver is simply unplayable on hard and higher without constant baby sitting.
While I wasn't a fun of attack animations of melee characters in DA:2 ( where you essentially "teleported" to your enemy in order to connect your hit ) I realised the that disconnection between you and your enemies is yet another element which adds to the clunky combat experience. I suspect that the developers didn't really test the game mechanics properly with keyboard and mouse controls. I can imagine that keeping the correct distance from enemies in melee while attacking them is much easier with a controller than K&M. You can partly address it by rebinding all the default key bindings for your main skills, but why I have to do that on the first place ?
So to summarise: poor camera, controls, order system, hit boxes and some melee combat issues really destroy the game experience and I doubt I'm alone on this.
In case you haven't noticed I'm trying really hard to leave other issues out of this thread like reaver class issues, the extremely limited number of active skills you can equip your character with or anything else for that matter.
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