The much awaited third installment to the Dragon Age series has finally been released in November.
I am a big Origins fan : I have completed the game four times, one a full run on Nightmare. I have played every class and every race, tried all the different Origins and the different romances. To me, it is a PC RPG classic. The game was fun and challenging, the story was a bit cliché but choice oozed through the game, I loved the character customization options, the character development and despite a few slow parts, the game was engaging throughout.
When DA2 was announced, I was very excited and pre-ordered it. I was very disappointed. The gameplay was bad. I hated the waves system and how enemies would magically appear in your face, or worse, how assassins would spawn behind your mages and one-shot them, making positioning completely moot. Areas were constantly reused, the characters were really annoying, everyone was bisexual which made no sense (I'm not hating, but it is true that it made no sense, come on), the dialog wheel was a terrible, terrible design option since oftentimes what was actually said had nothing to do with what you chose, you couldn't customize the gear of your companions, the combat system was a bit mindless and so on. It was just a terrible game and I'll admit I didn't even complete it. In short, it was too "consolized". I was expecting a follow-up to one of my favourite PC RPGs and instead I got a console port. I can deal with console influence but it was obvious DA2 was designed with consoles in mind first and foremost. However, to be fair, after playing DA:I, I went ahead and tried DA2 again. Somehow, I thought it was much better than when I first tried it years ago. The gripes I had with the game were still there, but they seemed less important, as I loved how almost every side quest mattered. I was finally drawn into it and it was fun to see choices you made in an unimportant side quest in the first act smack you in the face in the third. This is precisely what is absent from Inquisition. I 100%'d it with a mage, and playing a mage was tons of fun, which is another thing DA:I does badly. In fact, I'd now rate DA2 over DA:I.
What about DA:I?
I would have to say that I enjoyed myself while playing it, but that it is so almost completely in spite of the game itself.
Here's what I mean. You will read a lot of bitching and moaning by me about the game. There are so many things it does wrong and so little it does right. Despite all its faults, I can't say that I didn't enjoy myself. I've played 80 hours of it and completed it, although not at 100%. Looking back, it seems like a miracle that I even enjoyed it, but I did. Hopefully the reasons why will be made clear in this exploration.
Humble beginnings
I had a sense of dread when I played the first hour or so of the game. It was not interesting. Truth be told, the prologue is one of the worst ones I've suffered through. It's drawn out and it's boring. You are thrust pretty much in media res with a funky green hole in the sky that your character comes out of. People start thinking that Thedas' monotheistic goddess thrust you in the world and thus begins your quest for influence with the goal of countering what is now ailing the world. The Divine and her closest lieutenants are killed. Templars and mages are slaughtering each other and everyone caught in the middle. Demons appear out of nowhere. As is usual with Bioware games, you are the unlikely hero who's calling is to Make Everything Better ™.
The story is disappointing at best. Origins' story was cliché but this one is somehow worse, complete with the megalomaniac evil dude who wants to become a god. It isn't engrossing. I found myself not caring at all about the main arc. It is simply so commonplace, so hackneyed by the Bioware writing team. I found myself nearly emailing EA for a refund. Things do not get better until you are thrust into the first main area of the game, where you finally get a sense of the scope of the game.
The Hinterlands are vast. In fact, the area is simply huge. There are tons of things to do, to see and to collect. Exploring the zone brought me the first inkling of fun of the game. Truth be told, it's simply beautiful. I remember when I first started playing World of Warcraft, that I was in awe at how big the game was, and felt immersed in the world. This happened in DA:I too. The environment is really beautiful, and it feels like a real world to explore. I found no stutter while playing on my machine (Core i5-4670K, nVidia GeForce GTX 760 4GB, 8GB DDR3 RAM) at the highest settings, except in cutscenes where everything was stuttering a bit. I must have spent at least 1/3 of the game in the first zone, attempting to do everything.
A lot to do...but is it fun?
I ended up giving up after a while on doing everything. Why? The game is menial. Once the first impressions disappeared, I found myself confronted with reality : there is not much you do that actually matters. Quests are all the same : go to x place, bring y materials or kill z enemies. In other words, the vast, overwhelming in fact, majority of the game is composed of MMO-style fetch quests. With the Requisition system, they even installed generic fetch quests as a whole, complete system. You're asked to bring certain ingredients at a table and this gives you Influence and I think XP, over and over. Wow. I completely glossed through this part of the game.
You have little to no choice as to what to do while completing the quests. I expected much more. In The Witcher 2, even the side quests were replete with hard choices, and they were varied enough and had enough possible outcomes that you did not feel like some sort of errand boy. Even DA:O's side quests often offered multiple conclusions. There is only one possible outcome to the vast majority of the quests in DA:I, and that is completion in the way the game wants you do. That's all. You are truly a glorified errand boy in the worst MMO sense. You do not feel like the Inquisitor, the hero who will one day save Thedas. You feel like a chump looking for some old woman's ring for reasons.
There is a lot of materials to collect in the game. Now let me tell you that gathering materials is a huge chore. It was even worse before the patch when the materials you "pinged" with your search button didn't show up as a blip on the minimap, so you had to look everywhere for the faint, thin orange outline that signifies something can be picked up upon hearing the "ping" sound. The search button in this game isn't an auto-highlight by holding the button like DA:O. It's more like a radar. You have to wander around, spam the search button endlessly and when you hear a ping, investigate the source. It's a huge pain in the ass. What was wrong with simply holding the button?
Not only are there materials to collect, but numerous collectibles, such as bottles, mosaic pieces, landmarks or shards. DA:I steals a page out of traditional open-world games like GTA or Saints' Row. There's a lot of these things that are scattered around the numerous, vast areas of the game, and aside from the rifts to close, suffer from the same flaw as the quests in that you don't know why you're collecting these at all, except for XP and Influence Points (IP). There is no objective reason to. They are often hidden in hard to reach, frustrating positions on the map. The game expects you to do a lot just for the sake of doing it.
Worse yet, the vastly uninteresting content of the game is basically forced on you. To unlock more areas and more story missions, you have to collect Power Points (PP) that are awarded upon completion of some of the quests and the collection of collectibles. Other reviewers praise the game for this tie-in, but I hate it. It's an obvious attempt to make up for the crippling majority of the content that is simply uninteresting on its own but becomes something you must do in order to advance to something more interesting. Truth be told, I wouldn't have completed most of the side quests if I didn't need to just to advance into the game further because they were that much of a drag.
The seat of your power
The quests that you are involved in are not the only quests in the game. With the "War Room" mechanic, you can send either one of your three advisers to do a task by clicking on them on the map, choosing who to send and waiting for a period of time. They will come back with rewards.
Figure 1 : All of this is yours
Again, the vast majority of these War Room quests are filler. Oftentimes, you will send one of your guys on a 3 hours mission and he'll come back to you with a crappy amount of gold, a ridiculously small amount of influence and an item you have long since overleveled. The long delays between choosing a mission and its completion, plus the very limited number of advisers you have (not all of which can be used on every mission) means that doing stuff on the map is very, very long. I'll be honest here : this feels like a F2P mobile game. You know the drill, the ones where every action takes a stupid amount of time unless you pay to have it complete quicker? It's the same concept, without the paying.
Some of these missions do unlock new zones or areas within old zones but they are few and far between and pretty obvious anyway. The War Room is meant as a mechanic to develop the influence of the Inquisition all over Thedas. It falls short because you cannot discern the meaning of what you're doing anyway. Oh good, you sent troops to help some Fereldan arl, here's 60 gold for your trouble. That's it. It doesn't matter. There are some War Room chain quests but again, you are left without any overarching meaning as to your actions. This is a definite theme within the game and its biggest weakness.
Once you unlock Skyhold, you have a base worthy of that name to call your own. You can customize it : which banner you will fly, how the windows look, what's in your garden, how your throne and your bed looks. There is a lot of choice as to that customization but again, most of it doesn't matter. Your bed, for example. You will probably never go in your quarters for the whole of the game, so what does it change that you have a Dwarven bed? Especially when compared to the much more important issue of equipment (I'll talk about it later), it feels like a lot of effort went into a part of the game that doesn't really matter to the detriment of the areas that do.
By doing War Room missions and side quests, you collect Influence which raises your Inquisition level. Inquisition levels allow you to choose perks from a list. Some of these perks are basically mandatory (the unlocking doors one comes to mind if you want to complete some quests, since you cannot unlock them any other way), others are useless (like the ones giving you a farcical 10 of each kind of metal separated by tier - you can swim in more crafting ingredients than you need in 20 minutes). These perks are also the only way to get alternate dialog options for the Inquisitor, which are mostly useless.
The meaning of all of this
Figure 2 : I thought I knew what the game was looking for too
All of this is done so that you can advance the main story. In almost every game I've ever played, the main story arc in the most involved and the longest. It isn't so with DA:I. I would estimate that 95% of the game is busywork, the rest is the actual story.
The main story is ridiculously short. This is so in nearly any modern Bioware game but DA:I takes it to an extreme. If one was to cut the Power mechanic, it would be perfectly possible to complete the main story in a single sitting. One could probably do it in an afternoon. There are almost no choices in the story arc. The first one you have is whether you go help the Mages or the Templars. The second one is what happens to them. You then have to decide who rules Orlais (the most involved choice, I think, and the best mission in the whole game IMO). Afterwards, you choose how to deal with the Grey Wardens, you can influence who will run the Chantry, and finally, whether you destroy or use an ancient Elven artifact, and whether Morrigan or yourself does it. My memory might be a bit shaky and I might have forgotten some choices, but that's basically it. The fact that I might have forgotten some of the actual choices that you are presented with is a testament to how soulless the game is. I can recite every choice in Origins' main story by heart, and I could do so by the time I first completed the game because I felt invested and involved. Not so here.
It's also pretty bad. The main villain stems from a DA2 DLC. He basically shows up in your face, appearing from nowhere, you suddenly learn he hasn't been murdered by Hawke, and somehow got his hand on *spoilers following, highlight to read*an Elven artifact. With that, he aims to become Go.. I've honestly read fanfiction that was better. This is amateur-grade stuff. The writing team couldn't even be bothered to make an original, engaged villain, and had to go pick him up from the mass grave Hawke made in DA2 then just magic him inside DA:I's storyline using the most flimsy, cliché of excuses : *spoilers* oh he can magic himself into other people's bodies, that's how he survived because RED LYRIUM. Imagine if Bioware had decided to revive Saren in ME3 as the main villain using a trashy excuse like that. Besides, where have we seen that kind of villain before? Oh, right...Harry Potter. That's not a compliment. It was so silly, so forced, that I couldn't bring myself to feel anything against him, but then again, in most Bioware games, my feels usually are triggered by the side quests as every Bioware story is a collection of overdone clichés. It's just too bad the side quests this time around are equally uninvolved.
That being said, the final Inquisitor quotes...I cringed at the choices. I played my Inquisitor by encouraging all the religious worship around my personage. Then when I killed Corypheus, I had him say "I DON'T BELIEVE IN GODS!!!!" for the Hell of it. Yeah...*tips fedora*. In DA4, we'll see something like "**** YOU, I'M A DRAGON!!!" or "MY FAVOURED PRONOUNS ARE ZIR/ZIRS/ZIRSELF, GET IT RIGHT!!!!".
Speaking of out of place social criticism, religious worship and Gods, the story makes a big point of highlighting how worthless/cowardly/self-serving/delusional the Chantry is. I often felt like the whole game was one big allegory referring to the criticism of organized religion. If you choose a certain character as Divine, she basically becomes Pope Francis and that results in *spoilers* the complete and total annihilation of the Orlais Chantry as an unified body because like the stereotypical Christian, Andrastians apparently don't give a **** about the poor. That kind of criticism is perhaps something I can agree with IRL, but I question the relevance of its delivery in a video game made to entertain. Don't try the "well art is really meant as a vector of social change and video games are art" line : had it been less transparent, more subtle and indirect, perhaps it would have been a plus instead of a minus, but the story as conveyed in the game reads like a short story (I emphasize short) that you'd find on a teenager's tumblr. Good socially engaged art contains criticism veiled behind the piece of art. The aesthetic qualities reinforce the criticism, but they are the first line of battle, not the second. It doesn't scream what it wants to convey in your face, but makes you work to see what's behind it and discover its richness. In art as well as in debates, subtlety is the name of the game. When that criticism is yelled in your face, it looks quite silly and amateurish, which actually sums up the whole of the story pretty well.
Side note : now don't get me wrong. I'm fully aware of the reputation of Bioware as a progressive developer. In fact, neither the above, the homosexual/lesbian companions or in fact, any message Bioware seeks to transmit through their games bother me. In fact, I share their opinions. What I have a problem with is the overt manner with which they are transmitted. Criticism hurts hardest when it isn't so loud. Compare it to a debate between somebody who's cool, calm and collected, and another person seething in righteous indignation and yelling at the other guy. The screaming person might have good points, but he/she loses a lot of credibility by screaming. As I said about, subtlety is much better than histrionics. My opinion is that the "socially conscious" parts of Bioware games generally scream so loudly that they look tacked on, a bit insincere (even if it isn't the case, I'm sure the Bioware writers are very sincere) and little better than a marketing ploy. It looks like Vermont Law School screaming "ENVIRONMENTAL LAW!" when it's a tier 3 school at best. I would appreciate the same viewpoints better were they more indirect.
That being said, the final Inquisitor quotes...I cringed at the choices. I played my Inquisitor by encouraging all the religious worship around my personage. Then when I killed Corypheus, I had him say "I DON'T BELIEVE IN GODS!!!!" for the Hell of it. Yeah...*tips fedora*. In DA4, we'll see something like "**** YOU, I'M A DRAGON!!!" or "MY FAVOURED PRONOUNS ARE ZIR/ZIRS/ZIRSELF, GET IT RIGHT!!!!".
Speaking of out of place social criticism, religious worship and Gods, the story makes a big point of highlighting how worthless/cowardly/self-serving/delusional the Chantry is. I often felt like the whole game was one big allegory referring to the criticism of organized religion. If you choose a certain character as Divine, she basically becomes Pope Francis and that results in *spoilers* the complete and total annihilation of the Orlais Chantry as an unified body because like the stereotypical Christian, Andrastians apparently don't give a **** about the poor. That kind of criticism is perhaps something I can agree with IRL, but I question the relevance of its delivery in a video game made to entertain. Don't try the "well art is really meant as a vector of social change and video games are art" line : had it been less transparent, more subtle and indirect, perhaps it would have been a plus instead of a minus, but the story as conveyed in the game reads like a short story (I emphasize short) that you'd find on a teenager's tumblr. Good socially engaged art contains criticism veiled behind the piece of art. The aesthetic qualities reinforce the criticism, but they are the first line of battle, not the second. It doesn't scream what it wants to convey in your face, but makes you work to see what's behind it and discover its richness. In art as well as in debates, subtlety is the name of the game. When that criticism is yelled in your face, it looks quite silly and amateurish, which actually sums up the whole of the story pretty well.
Side note : now don't get me wrong. I'm fully aware of the reputation of Bioware as a progressive developer. In fact, neither the above, the homosexual/lesbian companions or in fact, any message Bioware seeks to transmit through their games bother me. In fact, I share their opinions. What I have a problem with is the overt manner with which they are transmitted. Criticism hurts hardest when it isn't so loud. Compare it to a debate between somebody who's cool, calm and collected, and another person seething in righteous indignation and yelling at the other guy. The screaming person might have good points, but he/she loses a lot of credibility by screaming. As I said about, subtlety is much better than histrionics. My opinion is that the "socially conscious" parts of Bioware games generally scream so loudly that they look tacked on, a bit insincere (even if it isn't the case, I'm sure the Bioware writers are very sincere) and little better than a marketing ploy. It looks like Vermont Law School screaming "ENVIRONMENTAL LAW!" when it's a tier 3 school at best. I would appreciate the same viewpoints better were they more indirect.
The worst part is that the choices you are presented with are either binary or a bit grey if only because you are not fully informed as to what will happen if you go through with it. Either this option, or that option. In DA:O, once you got to Redcliffe, you had the possibility to hurry to the Mage's Tower to find enough lyrium to complete the ritual to expunge the demon within Connor without anyone dying and without resorting to blood magic. You could also send Jowan, yourself or Irving in and use Connor's mother as a battery for the ritual. You could even strike a deal with the demon instead of killing it. There were sometimes a lot of different ways to complete a quest, and it nearly always ended up mattering. In Inquisition, there seems to be always just a few choices (often only two) that are mostly interchangeable. It isn't on Origins' level, much less The Witcher's. In fact, that the game's ending is so stupidly short speaks a lot to your level of actual involvement in what happens in the story.
Doing all the busywork you are meant to do actually ruins the main story, because you will be gravely overleveled when you do the story or explore other zones. The zones have a scaling range but do not scale to your level if you are too high (or too low) level for the area you are in. This means that the game basically plays itself even on the hardest levels if you go through all the **** you are meant to since you will be unstoppable. This is the one instance where full enemy scaling might have been warranted and they didn't put it in. In fact, the game actually actively works against itself where challenge is concerned. I'll let this final sentence stand as to how ridiculous the system is.
A system to kill them all, and in pain slaughter them
Figure 3 : THE RAPE TRAIN IS COMING AND IT AIN'T GOT NO BRAKES
Thankfully, there is one thing that kind of saves the game, and it's the combat system. Don't get me wrong, it's not amazing, but it's decent. Combat is way too easy thanks to how overleveled you generally are and the tactical screen blows chunks (again, console influence *sigh*). However, whereas the game itself is almost completely devoid of meaningful choice, the combat system does allow for some choices and strategy, if you choose to use it. You can still shatter frozen enemies, discharge paralyzed enemies and rupture weakened enemies, and there's still a bit of interplay between all the skills with cross-class skill combos à la DA2. You can melt ice walls. You have to engage your enemies wisely (in theory), as there are no healing spells. You heard me right. No healing spells. You heal solely through potions or some skills like the Reaver's Devour.
Mages cannot heal but can cast barriers to absorb the damage you take. Warriors can also generate guard that acts as a second life bar. This is my favourite change. In Origins, you could easily save your ass from a failed encounter by spamming healing spells and potions. Now, since your potions are limited in numbers and there are no healing spells, it favours a more careful style of play and a judicious use of barriers, at least in theory.
Controlling your character is at least very fun. I got a kick lasting 35 hours of pulling people with the Grappling Chain, then kicking their ass on the ground with the improved version of the skill only to land a Mighty Blow in their hapless faces, often killing them outright. Enemy mages and archers can be very frustrating (especially the mages since they can teleport around) so they are always a prime pulling target, and their low defense meant that I often one-shot them, giving me the sense that I was a Powerful Ultra Badass™. For the next 45 hours or so, I got a kick of using Charging Bull to knock whole groups of people on their ass then eating their flesh with Devour only to go apeshit crazy with Dragonrage spam. I felt that as I was playing a warrior, I was the one who dictated the flow of battle for my team by pulling or knocking down baddies I wanted to be dealt with as swiftly as possible and Whirlwind shitting on the rest. Basically, the spotlight was on me at all times. Controlling the Inquisitor is fun and a big step up from DA2 or even Origins.
The caveat is that the AI is dumb as a rock. Gone is the tactics screen from Origins. You can set who they will target (it's always the best choice to have them focus your target), when they will use potions (you're better off making them use them yourself) and how frequently or not they will use a given skill on a scale of 0 to 2 (not at all, sometimes or every time the cooldown is on). The AI will not use the skills correctly and will generally contribute little to damage. They will blow their focus abilities for little reason, or never use them, so you have to micro them. Worse yet, they will not GTFO from fire or any other bad **** on the ground, meaning they die easily to bosses and dragons. They play at the level of the worst WoW newbie.
You can fix all that by using the returned tactical screen, but it's terrible. For such a hyped feature ("THE TACTICAL SCREEN RETURNS!!!") they really screwed it up. It doesn't zoom out far enough to offer you a full view of the battlefield, for one. Controlling the cursor is a hassle. Sometimes the AI won't even do as you order them to. It's completely useless. I don't think anybody even uses it. I used it a lot in DA:O where it actually mattered. Nowadays I just play my main dude and hack everybody to pieces myself. I do ridiculous burst damage, even more ridiculous sustained damage thanks to how overpowered Dragonrage is and amazing AoE damage. Pulling, LoS and kiting don't really matter anymore aside from single enemies to instakill because the maps are so open. Positioning sorta does as a warrior, but only because Grappling Chain is buggy and will latch on a random nearby enemy if you aren't careful with your line of sight. I had equal success just potting up and ramming everybody with Charging Bull then Dragonraging everybody to death. At least there are no more random spawns and random waves.
The one thing that bothers me the most in the combat system is the skill tree system. There aren't many and they have very few skills. A lot of the points you spend will be spent on passive upgrades which isn't all that fun (isn't that why Blizzard entirely remade WoW's skill system?) You will only get one specialization in the game and you can never change it. You can't even choose your companions' specializations as they are all preset.
The worst thing, however, is that you will use only 8 skills in the entire game (7 if you don't count the Mark focus skill) because there are only 8 skill slots in the shortcut bar and you can't cast the rest from the menu. Bioware says that's enough - I say that's an unacceptable limit to player freedom. In fact, it's an unacceptable encroaching of console gameplay into a PC game. Keyboards have a lot of keys, controllers don't. It's obvious why there even is this limit. What would have been the cost in time and money to put in optional, additional shortcut bars? DA2 had 10 hotkeys but also had a full bar. You could at least click to use the spells or talents you used more rarely. I very quickly filled the tiny bar. I found myself wishing a lot that I had more options (for example, I wanted to make a Reaver that could pull people to him, taunt them, buff the whole team with Horn of Valor then go to town with 2H and Reaver skills, but there wasn't enough space to do so). I just...don't understand why any game would limit player choice so blatantly and with so rigid as system.
The worst thing, however, is that you will use only 8 skills in the entire game (7 if you don't count the Mark focus skill) because there are only 8 skill slots in the shortcut bar and you can't cast the rest from the menu. Bioware says that's enough - I say that's an unacceptable limit to player freedom. In fact, it's an unacceptable encroaching of console gameplay into a PC game. Keyboards have a lot of keys, controllers don't. It's obvious why there even is this limit. What would have been the cost in time and money to put in optional, additional shortcut bars? DA2 had 10 hotkeys but also had a full bar. You could at least click to use the spells or talents you used more rarely. I very quickly filled the tiny bar. I found myself wishing a lot that I had more options (for example, I wanted to make a Reaver that could pull people to him, taunt them, buff the whole team with Horn of Valor then go to town with 2H and Reaver skills, but there wasn't enough space to do so). I just...don't understand why any game would limit player choice so blatantly and with so rigid as system.
Some of the skills are at least very interesting to use but most of them are not. Gone are the sustained skills. All you've got are active skills.
Mages are the worst offenders. The old Primal tree in Origins is separated into 3 different elements. There are 4 base trees for every class in the game, plus one specialization tree. Basically, you have no choice but to play as a Primal mage and a bit of Entropy if you choose Necromancer, a bit of the DA2 Force tree if you choose Rift Mage and a melee mage if you pick Knight Enchanter which is the only true playstyle changing specialization. Even DA2, which split the Primal tree in two, at least allowed you to play a Spirit mage. This time around, Spirit is for the barrier and rez spells. I loved Entropy/Spirit/Creation/Blood Mage mages for the insane amount of CC they could dish out and their very respectable damage. I could put whole groups of mobs to sleep, Virulent Walking Bomb, Nightmare spell combo all of them then stun them with the Glyph Spell Combo, then cast Blood Wound FTW. Anything that lived would blow up from the Bomb and infect others to blow up too. Hell, DA2 mages were the most fun iteration. Come on, Pull of the Abyss/Gravitic Ring/Cone of Cold/Hemorrhage/Firestorm/Fireball/Chain Lightning was awesome. You can't do that in DA:I. There probably wouldn't be enough hotkeys in the bar for you do to so anyway!
In fact, mages have less CC than warriors do (they have more individual CC spells, but you have to choose between them as they are spread out between all the trees, giving you one or two real options to use, while nearly every skill a warrior gets and uses is CC), and their damage isn't that stellar since their spells are based on weapon damage, and staves are the worst DPS weapons in the game. Aside from barrier and the Veilfire/Energize map stuff, there is no reason to have a mage on your team. The sole exception is a Knight Enchanter main character because they are stupidly overpowered. They play a bit like Arcane Warriors (melee mages) and are just as broken, if not more because they can both do good DPS and never die.
Oh, and THERE IS NO BLOOD MAGE SPECIALIZATION. The single reason why mages are so dangerous in the lore makes NO APPEARANCE IN THE GAME. You'd think that due to every mage technically being an apostate, you'd see a lot more blood magic this time around, but there is none. Not even mobs. This is a HUGE OVERSIGHT. The caps prove it.
Melee rogues seem pretty bad (I haven't played one nor did I have one on my team thanks to the terrible AI) and I've heard they do less DPS than 2H warriors (especially Reavers) and that their DPS relies on their skills, with their daggers doing shitty auto-attack damage. Ranged rogues seem pretty fun in theory, I like the traps and the mines from the Artificer spec, and they do good opening burst.
The toughest enemies, the dragons, are stupidly easy and your teammates will only die because they can't dodge enemy attacks. Get a few resist flasks of the pertinent element and some resist gear, and you're done. On Normal, you don't even need that. My experience was that spamming Dragonrage and Devour in the Ring of Pain field was enough to kill any dragon. Normal enemies have a lot of health points to the point where a 5k crit won't kill them (my warrior has 1000 HP or so) but they do consistently pathetic damage to you. It feels a little silly.
Oh, and remember the trailer where you could blow up parts on the environment to fall on enemies and damage and hamper them? Forget that. I haven't seen a single point in the game where I could do that, much less have it matter. It might be in, but I've never seen an instance where you could actually do it, which leads me to believe it's pretty damn rare.
Equipment, or how to look fugly 80 hours in
Figure 4 : my character would be more in its place in some kind of stage play than a battlefield dressed like that
You can customize your companion's gear. At least there's that. Aside from that, the loot table and equipment system is the worst of the series.
A word of warning to the wise : DO NOT PLAY A QUNARI INQUISITOR. I was very excited to play a Qunari because let's face it, they look badass. In this game, they look anything but. Armour looks terrible on them. They have no helmets. Forewarned is forearmed.
In contrast to the vastly useless Skyhold customization system, the sole area of the game where customization matters is seriously underdeveloped. Look at my armor. That's T3 (the final tier) crafted with Dragon Bone and other T3 materials. Does that look like any kind of badass late-game armor to you? The answer is : NO IT ****** DOESN'T. Late-game crafted Skyrim armour looked badass. Late-game DA:O drops could look good. You would be excused in Inquisition if you thought I had the same armour for the whole of the game, because I basically did.
This is the armour I had 15 hours into the game :
Figure 5 : barf
Yeah it's ugly as sin (especially the colour), but it was an unique and better than what I could craft.
This is the armour I had 30 hours into the game :
Figure 6 : alright...
The armour in the first picture in this section was my endgame armour. I crafted it maybe 2 hours before I finished the main story at 80 hours clocked in. You will notice that aside from the colour, it basically looks almost the same as the armour I had 50 hours earlier. There are only minute differences between the armour tiers. None of these 3 armours look badass. I'll admit the final one looks okay from a colouring standpoint, but it does not look epic. Counting the very first armour piece, I have worn a grand total of 4 armour pieces for the whole game, which brings me to my next point.
The loot tables in this game are horrible. Unique equipment (the purples) is almost always inferior to anything that you can craft yourself at almost any point in the game if you are dutifully hunting for schematics. At level 18, I still had minimum level 10 gear dropping from mobs. It was completely useless. Your characters will be stuck wearing the same equipment for extremely long stretches of time as white quality quickly becomes absolutely worthless. You will hang on to your magical equipment until you find or craft better, which can take a very long time. Most uniques have shitty stat spreads and are thus useless. Moreover, most don't even look good. That red armour was a unique. It's cringeworthy. Meanwhile, there's like 20 different banners and windows and 15 beds to choose from for your keep. What's the point? Why not focus artistic resources on something that actually matters? You might never visit your quarters but you'll look at your character all day long.
Qunari really get the shaft. I have found no uniquely Qunari armour but I've found restricted armour for every other race. Base armour looks terrible on Qunari. Qunari also cannot use helmets. Instead they have "vitaars" which are just face paints. As you cannot craft vitaar (but you can craft helmets) you are completely at the mercy of the game as to what vitaar you will use, and they are all generic stat sticks. I've probably used something like 3 different ones. They're all really ugly too, one made me look like an Asari (the one in the pic where the face of my dude is blueish) and another transformed my face into this road sign :
Aside from that, there's the usual belts, rings and amulets, and the weapons. The first three are completely forgettable (and you can't craft them, BTW, so again not only you're at the mercy of the loot table, but they will always be generic + stat or skill upgrades that make it last 30% longer or do 30% more damage), the last one is the most important part of the game but suffer from the same problem as armours in that most don't look all that awesome and what you'll find will be inferior to what you can craft.
Speaking of the devil
Figure 7 : at least crafting's fun
The crafting component in the game is by far and away the best part, and the most improved from the series. Notwithstanding how terribly dull and annoying collecting ingredients is, it gives you a lot of leeway in forging a piece of equipment you actually want.
There are offense, defense and utility slots whose number and amount of ingredient they will fit in vary, plus one masterwork in high-end schematics and one base slot in every schematic, and a rune slot for weapons. Each ingredient will have a different effect on the equipment that you are forging depending on which slot they are placed in. The base slot determines armour rating and damage, and it's always best to use the highest tier ingredient you can muster since that's all that matters in the calculation. Depending on which ingredient you use, the piece will change colours, so you can "dye" it to your liking.
Getting schematics is easy, you can just buy them. In fact, gold only serves to buy schematics since vendors are otherwise useless in this game. You can also use gold to buy influence but you'll have a lot of that doing the quests anyway. The gear they carry sucks, the ingredients they carry suck. You can also have schematics drop which removes the whole point of vendors in this game.
Even in the same tier, different ingredients will have different effects. For example, one metal in the utility slot might give you + constitution, + strength or a mixture of both. One leather in the offense slot might gives you + % bleed on hit or + % critical rate. Since every schematic varies and not all have slots of every type in equal proportions, it's important to find one that suits your character. For example, my 2H warrior serves as both main DPS and tank, so I like to have heavy armours with a lot of offense and utility slots instead of defense slots, so I can stack + % attack (offense) and + str/con (utility) materials on them to give me a well-rounded armour. Some schematics are quite useless (defensive slots on mage armour...)
The same mentality applies to armour and weapon upgrades that you can craft and slot in your equipment, so you can really customize your equipment to your liking if you choose to. Again, I mostly stack attack, str, health and con on mine to give me a warrior that can take damage and dish it out.
Masterwork slots use fade-touched or masterwork components to give your equipment special effects. For example, I crafted a weapon with a masterwork material that allows me to generate 3 guard with every hit, and I crafted an armour with a material that gives me 10% chance to cast Hidden Blade (usually a rogue skill), which is a multistrike skill, every time I smack someone. That allows me to both stack guard to survive and deal ridiculous damage when Hidden Blades procs. There are a lot of different masterwork materials that you can use but unfortunately, most of them just slap a generic 10% stat upgrade across the board, however some are very cool.
Furthermore, crafted equipment is vastly superior to anything you will ever find in the game. Once you get T2 schematics there is no reason to ever wear any armour or use any weapon you will find in the game.
You cannot craft accessories and you cannot craft vitaar (but you can helmets), which removes a bit of the point of crafting in the first place since you are still at the mercy of the RNG for your accessories, which will always be generic. No cool masterwork effects for them. So basically you will have crafted material in only three slots on your character, which is a damn shame because the crafting system is one of the best parts of the game.
I also felt that runes were underutilized. They are either elemental damage or damage versus certain enemies. DA had way more runes (even if they were about as imaginative, that is to say, not very) because you could also slot them in armour. I'm at a loss as to why that was scrapped, especially because if there were armour runes and a little imagination, very cool stuff could have been done. It would have been cool to have more options akin to WoW's enchantments, which were varied despite there always being a single best option. For example, a chance on hit to get 100% armor penetration, or a chance to have your weapon explode, send shrapnel everywhere that hurts enemies, only to come back and reform as your blade, or an armour rune that has a chance to emit an elemental shockwave if you're struck in melee, stuff like that would have been very cool.
What dialogue?
Finally, dialogue and companion development.
The dialogue wheel is back. It's thankfully a bit better than it was in DA2 because the lines do not seem as different as the wheel snippets but I'm still of the opinion that a fully voiced protagonist removes some level of immersion. What is inexcusable is how what you say doesn't matter outside of the choices you have to take, which are clearly marked.
In every PC RPG under the sun, there is nigh always an option to charm, persuade or intimidate. No such thing in DA:I. Alternate dialogue options are unlocked through the perks, are linked to certain topics (for example, the Force one gives you knowledge about the underworld), show up once in a blue moon and rarely seem to matter at all. In Origins, a good Persuade level was almost mandatory due to how useful it was and how it could make your life so much easier. There is nothing of the sort in Inquisition, and it would be a bit useless anyway, given that 99% of the content gives you no choice at all. This removes a lot of immersion and makes the Inquisitor feel bland. I do not know why that was scrapped.
In DA2, the kind of answer you'd give would shape the personality of your protagonist when interacting with companions and during unprompted dialogue. That's completely gone, but that's because the main character never speaks unless prompted to by the player. This is a bit of an uncomfortable in-between, as you still don't know what exactly your character will say, but you also can rarely check at a glance what kind of emotion it's supposed to convey as you at least could in DA2 (you can sometimes).
The companions are unfortunately a mixed bag. Varric is still Varric, and he's awesome. Cassandra is basically Aveline plus religious nonsense. Solas has the coolest back story and is interesting to interact with because of his Fade scholarship and his stories. Iron Bull doesn't act like a Qunari at all and sounds like he's been in Southern Thedas too long : he's almost completely assimilated despite (or due to?) being a Qunari spy. He's certainly no Sten. Sera is a crazy, infantile ******. Cole's gimmick is that he's a cryptic Fade spirit. Dorian is okay, gives you a bit of a window in the Tevinter Empire which is a very underutilized part of the lore. Blackwall is the typical Warden, all duty, and is actually my favourite companion because next to almost everyone in the cast, he's down to Earth and rational. The cast this time around pales in comparison to Origins, but at least it's better than DA2's.
The interactions between the companions aren't witty, aren't funny, they aren't nothing. They are quite badly written. All I've heard is my team bickering. I can't even remember any of them. No Alistair asking Wynne to sew his socks. No Oghren hitting on Wynne. No Morrigan constantly insulting Alistair. No Zevran being Zevran.
The companion quests seem to be mostly filler that forces you to visit every single zone to find some ****. Cassandra wants you to kill a zillion targets out of revenge. Blackwall wants you to magically undercover Grey Warden artifacts stranded all around the world. To be fair, they might be more involved and interesting farther in, but I gave up doing them because the first steps were just more busy work that I had done a thousand times already, except worse because this time I had to visit every single zone to look for hidden objects or people. Alistair trying to find his sister, for example, and having her be a gold digging ******. Oghren trying to find an old love and his son with your character convincing him to settle down and have a life after Branka. Sten trying to find his sword and atone for the murder of the farmer's family due to his panicked state. Those were REAL companion quests. Mass Effect's companion quests were even better examples. I don't know what happened this time around.
And finally, the romances. They are still clumsily written, forced, geeky attempts at love stories, but that's a Bioware thing. Frustrated straight males still whine about the coverage given to homosexual couples, like such a thing matters. However, the two romances offered to straight male characters are even worse than Origins' attempts. Cassandra is the cliché of a tough girl with a sensitive, feminine side she tries to hide. She's a romanceable Aveline. Josephine is...uhhh...I don't even know. She's just really generic, the usual high-born girl. I will say that either of the options are uninteresting, unattractive and flat. I can't speak for the other options because I've completed the game only once. Maybe they are better. I will say that I do not really give a **** whether there are homosexual romances or not in the game. It's a game. I liked romancing Zevran in Origins as a male character because he was hilarious. I'm just glad the whole cast isn't bisexual as that stretches credibility a bit.
Conclusion
You have heard a lot of whining from me about the game and you might be wondering how on Earth I ended up enjoying myself. The truth is, I don't know. As I said, I did, but despite the game. The graphics were really nice. The maps were huge and fun to explore for the scenery's sake. Controlling your character in combat could be fun. The crafting system is well done, albeit incomplete. All in all, Inquisition feels a lot like a single player MMORPG. You do a lot of stuff but there isn't much you do that ultimately impacts the world. I think that the ending slideshow, which has like 4 or 5 slides telling you about the state of the world, implies how empty the game ultimately is. Origins' ending slideshow had a lot more parts and seemed much more complete.
If I had to review DA:I using just one word, "bloated" definitely comes to mind. I couldn't help but shake the feeling that almost every side quest was just filler for the horrendously short main story. Yes, the game has a lot of content. Yes, the game takes ages to complete at 100%. But that only really matters if you even want to complete the game at 100%. I didn't, really. By the time I left the Hinterlands I was tired of the endless fetch quests. MMOs can pull this off because questing is the means to an end (high level content) and because you've got other human beings around to make it less tedious. DA:I isn't an MMO. The end result is that the game feels both bloated and devoid of actual, meaningful content. Perhaps "bloated with gas" is an apt metaphor.
If I had to review DA:I using just one word, "bloated" definitely comes to mind. I couldn't help but shake the feeling that almost every side quest was just filler for the horrendously short main story. Yes, the game has a lot of content. Yes, the game takes ages to complete at 100%. But that only really matters if you even want to complete the game at 100%. I didn't, really. By the time I left the Hinterlands I was tired of the endless fetch quests. MMOs can pull this off because questing is the means to an end (high level content) and because you've got other human beings around to make it less tedious. DA:I isn't an MMO. The end result is that the game feels both bloated and devoid of actual, meaningful content. Perhaps "bloated with gas" is an apt metaphor.
Should you buy it? No, not right now. I would wait for a 50% price slash or a few DLCs if the latter are any good in the end. Critics are hailing it as the GOTY but I don't think it is, far from it. In fact, Bioware has only sunk a little deeper in my view. They are definitely not the company that brought us Baldur's Gate II (the devs involved with that all left, no wonder why) or even Mass Effect 2, which was a vastly superior game. Divinity : Original Sin and Wasteland 2 are much better RPGs. However, we must recognize that video gaming changed. People want a lot to do and for it to look as good as possible, but not much to think about. DA:I has a huge amount of content, a full clear will take hundreds of hours, and it's beautiful to boot, but that only matters if you even want to do it all, which I didn't. DA:I has a very imbalanced filler-to-stuff that matters ratio. I can only describe it as the most uninvolved RPG I've played. The Witcher 3 will undoubtedly blow this out of the water in May 2015. It won't even be a fair fight. Save your money for that if you have to choose.
That being said, video game critics are either retarded or bought and paid for, especially since it's an EA game. That's why there's even all this GOTY hype while there is no question that the game itself is average at best.
However, you can always be certain that you're getting the truth from me.
Thank you for reading.
Retour en haut
, and all i can say, i envy your patience.
) with 100+ hours of gameplay and 2-3 totally unexplored zones.
