@StrangeStrategy -- I respect your opinion. Like I've said from the beginning, I don't think that I represent a pronouncement from Olympus on high so much as a different stream of the vox populi that finds itself bored and dissatisfied with the decisions BioWare made in making DAI. I'm not sure that it's fair to call me blinded by nostalgia -- in previous posts, I've said that I really enjoyed (with caveats) DAII, and I stand by that. I think that if BioWare had taken DAII and adapted it to the kind of big, expansive world we saw in DAO, they could have won over players like you and appealed to players like me. Instead, a lot of people are complaining that BioWare tried to reinvent the wheel and ended up alienating fans like me who would have otherwise bought a new BioWare game sight unseen.
Still, let me try to clarify my opinions:
Proper use of Barrier and Guard will save you potions. You're playing wrong if you're using all of them or most of them in a single fight against enemies of equal level. There have been fights on Nightmare where I didn't or barely used Tac Cam and just charged in: Used all consumables, including Bees, still died. Then, with proper tactics and micro, got through the fight with 1/3 bees left and 5/8 potions left. And it was a tought fight. And if you don't understand why going back to camp to rest up and heal is "immersive" than... Come on. What do you want? Instantly regenerating health? You're nitpicking.
I'm deeply suspicious of people telling me that there's a "right way" to play a western RPG. I know you don't want me invoking DAO again, but I find it useful for comparison: My elf mage Warden was the epitome of a glass cannon. She had almost no way to mitigate damage, and all of her mana was used for pulverizing enemies on the battlefield. While she became "Warden, Destroyer of Worlds", I used my warriors to make a meat shield in front of her. I liked that idea, because in my head, my elf mage Warden was an angry, vitriolic person, and I could see her as the main damage-dealer in the party. In another playthrough, I was a human mage, and since she was a calmer, more benevolent person, I designed her to be purely support -- buffing herself, the rest of the party, and healing so that the rest of her companions were the unstoppable juggernaut plowing through Darkspawn hordes. And you know what? I didn't have a problem with either playthrough. DAO was designed to be versatile enough to allow for any character design to be playable.
DAI doesn't allow for that same level of latitude. What if I'm playing a mage and I don't want to learn Barrier? Oh, I'll get stun-locked by teleporting enemies and have a quarter of my health taken off in each hit. Can I be a purely support character? Oh, most of my spells are essentially variations on doing crowd-control damage. Can I at least sink all my points into the Inferno tree and specialize in raining fiery, hellish death down on my foes? Oh, there are enemies immune to fire.
I found that DAI punished me, rather than encouraged me, when I went off-script. I felt the game resisting when I tried to make my mage anything other than a crowd-controller. It almost seemed that the DAI developers regarded my intentions to actually role-play as a bug and not a primary facet of western RPG's. If BioWare sounded the buzzer and slapped my hand every time I tried to make my mage Inquisitor unique, then why even give us the illusion of customization?
Its been more than a week. It takes time to travel and the game doesn't tell you that, it just assumes you could assume. BTW, people fear the Qunari, Vashoth, Tal-Vashoth, or actual Qunari: Just like mages. That doesn't mean people aren't willing to follow you, especially after its shown you're not trying to convert them to the Qun. Also, Josephine. Once again, you're not thinking things through and whining about something that you're wrong about...
I didn't have a problem with my Qunari mage becoming the leader of the Inquisition. On a meta level, when I play a fantasy game, I somewhat expect my player character to become the hero of the story. But the writers didn't give me a convincing reason why I became the leader of the Inquisition. I started off the game as a glorified mall-cop, and a member of not one, but two, hated and feared minorities.
So I close the rift, pass out, and wake up again X number of days later having been all but announced as the leader of the breakaway Inquisition. I want to give you a parallel situation to consider: Imagine that the President of the United States appointed a Muslim to be the the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the highest-placed military roles in the country. You have to imagine that there would be a terrible outcry from xenophobes, nativists, and Christian fundamentalists. That is 21st Century America. Thedas is the equivalent of 14th Century Europe. I can accept people coming around to accept a Qunari mage Inquisitor. But I wanted to be shown the process, not simply told that "all of your vassals love you now, Inquisitor!"
You only liked Cassandra? She was one of my favorites too, but I also had strong opinions on the rest... excluding Varric, he is just Varric, you know?
I liked Cassandra because I got to know her before the game really started. I got to go on a "test run" with her, hearing her opinions, seeing how she fought, experiencing her interplay with my Inquisitor. That I got to warm up to her opened the door to further characterization. I should rephrase my opinion -- I didn't dislike the other companions. I just didn't care about them. They felt like non-factors to me, and I didn't care about learning anything more about them.
Blackwall was the worst to me. That's a shame, because it really felt like there was going to be something interesting going on with him later in the game. If BioWare had forced us to deal with him for a whole mission, it could have opened the door to getting to know him. Why didn't BioWare, for instance, introduce Blackwall by making us clear out a deep and dangerous Darkspawn nest that was threatening the region? Instead we got Leliana telling us there's a dude in the Hinterlands to recruit. When we get there, Blackwall is indeed that dude. We kill a few non-threatening goons, and then he joins our party with nothing more than a fizzle.
I mean, what happened to introductions like Fenris's? We got tricked by him into killing a cart-load of slavers, then he awkwardly cajoles us into helping him slaughter every moving thing in an abandoned mansion while he gets more and more livid with rage. When you get done, he thanks you and tacitly threatens to put a knife between your ribs if you're a mage. That's an introduction to a companion.
Zevran's introduction is similar to Templar Cole's. We fully expect him to be a ravenous demon, but he is just (apparently) a weird boy saying odd things, trying to help you. Just saying, you either have nostalgia goggles on or you were so turned off to the game due to the constant crashing it soured your opinion of everything else. I suppose I can't blame you for that.
Am I still blinded by nostalgia if I can admit to you that I saw the potential for DAI to be better than Origins? If BioWare had taken its lessons from DAO and DAII and expanded on them, I think that I would have been sitting here raving about how good Inquisition was. As it stands, BioWare threw out everything they had learned in DAO and DAII in order to "reinvent" the series. To give you a metaphor, BioWare could have taken the solid design from its old "cars" and expanded on them to give us a new car that had the best qualities of novelty and stability. Instead, they unveiled a car with square wheels and expect us to praise their innovative spirit.
And also: If you didn't even finish the first main quest (Champions of the Just / In Hushed Whispers) wtf are you you complaining about? You didn't even give the game a chance to get better. Crappy review.
I could also stick my hand in a pot of boiling water, and after twenty hours, I imagine my nerves would be dead enough that it wouldn't be unbearable anymore. But the fact remains that I still had to stick my hand in a pot of boiling water for twenty hours to get there.
If a game takes more than twenty hours to become -- the very least -- endurable, why should I bother? Especially when there are games that I can start playing and expect an enjoyable experience from the word "go"? When I returned DAI, I went to Steam and got Deus Ex: Human Revolution, BioShock Infinite, and Dragonfall with the returned money. All of those games caught my attention from the first minute, despite two of them being significantly older than DAI and one of them being made with a miniscule fraction of DAI's budget. What makes it even more shocking is that in BioShock Infinite, there's no actual combat or challenge for close to half an hour. How does an action game without action manage to keep people's attention, then? Infinite never bothers with a pretension to "Skyrim-like open-worldness". You can explore at your leisure, but the only way to go is forward. DAI dumps you in the big, empty, MMO wasteland of the Hinterlands and lets that set the tenor for the rest of the game. You can tell people to "get out of the Hinterlands", but if enduring the beginning of a game requires advice from others and whole articles in gaming magazines, then there's something seriously wrong there.
Retour en haut
No more pre-ordering, no more 0 day buying, no more two month fretting over when the company will spit a tiny tad of spittle our way, like we're leper beggars on the streets. Let them release, flop, be forced to discount, be forced to release multiple patches to patch their broken ****, AND THEN buy it plus DLCs for a good discount. Simplicity 
