For me, the Inquisitor also somewhat bland and distant, personal opinion of course as evident by many responses in this thread, and in the end I felt that for me it was the combined effect of two design choices.
First are is the joint effect of the large areas and lack of interaction during side quests. Now most of the side quests do follow the same structure than DAO and DA2, by the way from now on I will for simplicity only refer to DA2, but it largely also applies to DAO. You meet someone/find something, go through combat scenes and kill someone/find something. However, in DA2 there was usually a dialogue and choices of response when accepting the quest and you had a dialogue and/or choice after completing the side quest. Often it might have been cosmetic, but it did allow PC to establish who they were or how they felt about the situation. In DAI most quests are given, accepted without much comment and when they are finished, they just end with a bright text saying it has now been done. There is no real push given that something has been accomplished and outside the occasional judgements, no real capability for the PC to express their stand on what just happened. In addition to this, since the areas are so huge, there can literally be hours between times the PC has to react to something, further decreasing the sense of the character since they did not feel really present in the game.
Now, these choices are understandable in a sense, as they are a natural consequence of choosing to focus on exploration and large areas. Not only do they need resources to craft such large areas, they also need to populate them with something to do/find, thus requiring more resources. In a funny way, it is almost the opposite of what happened with DA2, where they had the same maps, but more interactive stuff using those exactly same areas. And ultimately they gave each area a unique story supported by those side quests, but just did not really have the character have any presence in those stories, at least from my perspective. I feel the War Table, I feel I am misremembering that term, missions were supposed to partially allow the choice based substance, but to me the problem with that was that it did not feel like they were not able to implement it in a desired fashion, as your choices there did not really alter the Inquisition or how it perceived in any manner and it ended up feeling really disconnected from the rest of the game. Based on the pre-release interviews, I suspect that this is something they had to cut back on and originally wanted the Inquisition to feel much more organic as it ended up feeling, but nevertheless, to me, it just made the PC feel really bland.
The second issue is the voice actor direction, and this is something I am honestly struggling to comprehend. To explain why, I need to refer momentarily to Mass Effect. Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer took very different approaches to playing the character, showing how much the voice actor brings to the table in making those characters breath, and something that, to me, it is often overlooked when arguing which one was better is that the game provided two different options for the character, thus if the player did not feel constrained by gender, they could easily find an approach that worked for them and their tastes. Now the reason I feel this is relevant to the DAI discussion is that they provided two voice actors per gender, thus four voice actors total, and had all four have the exactly the same approach to playing the character by having each dialogue choice be neutrally voiced and each emotional reaction be subdued. This is to me the thing I cannot comprehend, as they did not have a situation where they had to choose which crowd to cater to, but they could have very easily had one voice actor take the subdued/neutral approach and other to have a more emotional/reactive style.
The decision on the voice direction is something I would love to hear Bioware rational for, not because I feel they need to defend themselves or I have a right for any kinds of decision explanations, but rather just because I usually try to understand the reasoning behind decisions and cannot with this, probably purely a complete lack of understanding on my part. After all, femShep is almost a cult icon and, while many had problems with Hawke, most of those not being opposed to voice acting had issues with the dominant personality part rather than the emotive responses, something that was addressed by reaction wheel. If they only had one voice actor per role, I understand that there are players with different preferences and that the game makers need to decide which one to cater to. Yet her, to repeat myself, they provided two options for the voice per gender, but had both options directed to the same crowd.
Far longer response than I expected, and most like TLDR. Sorry about that and my gratitude to anyone who trudged through it.
Retour en haut
