11 réponses à ce sujet

[ModernAcademic]

Inquisition had a sensational beginning with the prisoner in Haven waking up without his memories and being questioned by a distressed Cassandra about a crime he didn't commit. All the while, demons are pouring from the heavens while a large rift of a sickening green revolves in the skies.

 

This great beginning promised to introduce us to an epic story. But what we got after this great start was...performing menial tasks and talking to random NPCs in the Hinterlands.

 

Many people have already expressed -quite emphatically, btw- their frustration with the Hinterlands. Some have spent hours increasing their power just to be able to advance in the story. This is a terrible way to begin an epic tale. When you announce to the player he'll become the leader of a powerful institution, you don't expect to spend over fifty hours of gameplay wandering the wilderness looking for elfroot and speaking to hundreds of NPCs to complete irrelevant quests that have no significant impact on the plot. That is something to come much later in the game, when you've advanced in the story and are completing small quests in order to gain more points and open more possibilities of world exploration and levelling up your characters. In other words, it should be an optional part of the gameplay and therefore not shoved in the player's face as a mandatory quest to progress in the main storyline.

 

What's worse is that, shortly after leaving the Hinterlands, we remember hearing about the awesome beauty of Val Royeaux from Leliana in Origins. But when we actually visit the Orlesian capital, it's nowhere near what it was promised to be.

Compare Val Royeaux to the capital of the Empire from Final Fantasy XII, for instance, and you see the HUGE difference of scale between the world of Ivalice and Thedas.

(Final Fantasy XII was released many years ago. Why are its open world, dungeons and locations so superior to Inquisition's Thedas when it comes to size and complexity? Shouldn't Bioware have learned from Square Enix how to build an open world, since that's what it proposed to do with Inquisition?)

 

Bioware,please don't repeat the same mistake in DA 4. Don't start the game with a second Hinterlands. Don't promise to introduce amazing cities if you can't deliver. If you have to spend more time to develop the game and deliver an adequate product, then do so. But don't release a game with a mediocre development, with severe problems concerning the evolution of the plot and without proper planning in key stages (the whole swift change from the Old Gods' theme to Elven mythology was poorly done and left too many loose ends). Otherwise, you'll only compromise your image with your faithful public.

 

Signed,

A very forlorn fan.

[vbibbi]

It's hilarious that Bioware was sharing the "Leave the Hinterlands!" meme when it came out. I mean, it's great that they can acknowledge weakness in game pacing, so hopefully they take it to heart when designing DA4.

[cJohnOne]

I didn't mind the Hinterlands but Val Royeaux was a little small. Especially for being the Capitol of an Empire.

[thats1evildude]

The Hinterlands serve basically the same function as Lothering in DAO: they're a starting area where you run through shitty side quests to earn a little XP before moving on to somewhere actually important.

[vbibbi]

I dunno, Hinterlands is about 100x larger than Lothering and takes an equivalent amount of time to complete. Plus it's the major site of remaining Mage-Templar battlefields and houses Redcliffe, the second largest urban area we can visit. I would say that the crossroads section of the Hinterlands can function like Lothering, and once we get the power needed to travel to Val Royeaux we can leave and return later to deal with the rest of the map. But Bioware boasted before launch that the first major map of the game was larger than all of DAO combined; I didn't get the impression that they thought having the Hinterlands be so large and unwieldy would have been negatively received.

[FKA_Servo]

I actually left Hinterlands before finishing it without even needing to be told to, and I didn't even unlock Emerald Graves or  Exalted Plain till my second playthrough.

 

I think people just need to tamp down the completionist instinct. The way things seem to be going, every single meaty RPG is gonna take 200+ hours to platinum win it. What's the point? It's like a job then.

[London]

Lothering was more interesting to me because it had more story content compared to its size.  After the main quest in Hinterlands, it just kind of drags.  It has a few interesting stories here and there and is fine for a generic zone, but I wish they did way more with the mage/templar conflict than having us kill about 8 on each side and saying its over.

[Kantr]

I love the hinterlands. One of the best looking maps in the game.

[Jesse the dragon slayer]

I didn't mind the size of the Hinterlands or even doing the simple fetch quests, however I didn't like the lack of meaningful impact the only thing that seemed to have any impact at all in the Hinterland was the choosing what to do with the refuges after you help them the taking care of the templars and mages out in the wild had little to no meaningful affect. The fetch quests should be a bit more like DAO where you help that one dwarf become a member of the assembly and for elimination quests a bit more like DA2 where you get approached by a shadyish person who pays you for eliminating their enemies If they have a place that large or even if they don't I want to feel like what I'm doing is important

[dgcatanisiri]

There was a structural problem, I think, in the way that Inquisition handled this, and I honestly think it's a side effect of BioWare responding to the complaints of DA2. The driving complaint about DA2 on a design level was the reuse of locations, that they had the one cave map split up into various sections and things like that. The response that came about in Inquisition was to make every location vast and diverse. The problem is that what they were then filled with was quests that honestly would have had the same effect as war table ops - go here and place this or that. These were NOT the tasks that the leadership of an organization like the Inquisition should have handled personally.

 

I know the developers have said 'what's on the war table is there because the alternative was that it wouldn't be in the game at all,' but really, I think all of us would have taken smaller zones - from the Hinterlands to the Hissing Wastes - for even a handful of those missions implemented in game. Because the problem is that many of these zones are filled with NOTHING. Okay, there's the odd pretty sight and landmark and even local wildlife running around, but overall, there's literally vast stretches of emptiness, where all there is to do is look at the scenery. And yes, it's lovely scenery, but at the same time, it's not asking anything of the player.

 

Because although the 'fetch quests' grant the Inquisition power, it's not something that feels like something the Inquisitor and their Inner Circle should be personally handling - a four-star admiral is not going to hand deliver a message between a couple of ensigns (that's the best analogy I could come up with). The entire game suffers this problem, the Hinterlands just bear the brunt of it because that's the first zone we go to. EVERY zone has a good amount of quests that, really, someone of the Inquisitor's position should not be handling themselves. They should be handing off that task to like the requisitions officer or someone.

[vbibbi]

Something Bio ignored from DA2's complaints was the lack of reactivity and change in the maps. It's more noticeable in DA2 since Kirkwall doesn't change at all between acts, but maybe if DAI's maps had had more interactivity it could have helped.

 

For example: rather than each zone having every quest available as soon as we enter, thereby making completionists think they have to finish one zone completely before going into another one, limit the initial quests available in the maps. Don't have the bandit leaders in that fort with the key to Valammar appear until both the rebel mages and rebel templars have been taken care of. Reduce the mage-templar side quests until after the fighting is over; we could say it's too dangerous to start looking through huts and corpses for notes that lead to hidden stashes until the war going on around us has been taken care of.

 

They could have even had a more dynamic system for rifts: the higher level rifts appear either after we reach a certain level or finish a specific quest. This would be similar to Solas' quest through measuring the Veil, that new rifts are still popping up and demonstrate the longterm threat of leaving the Breach open. This would of course need to be done before IYHSB or else change the structure so that the Breach isn't closed until the end of the game, which looks like it was the original plan.

[ModernAcademic]

There was a structural problem, I think, in the way that Inquisition handled this, and I honestly think it's a side effect of BioWare responding to the complaints of DA2. The driving complaint about DA2 on a design level was the reuse of locations, that they had the one cave map split up into various sections and things like that. The response that came about in Inquisition was to make every location vast and diverse. The problem is that what they were then filled with was quests that honestly would have had the same effect as war table ops - go here and place this or that. These were NOT the tasks that the leadership of an organization like the Inquisition should have handled personally.

 

I know the developers have said 'what's on the war table is there because the alternative was that it wouldn't be in the game at all,' but really, I think all of us would have taken smaller zones - from the Hinterlands to the Hissing Wastes - for even a handful of those missions implemented in game. Because the problem is that many of these zones are filled with NOTHING. Okay, there's the odd pretty sight and landmark and even local wildlife running around, but overall, there's literally vast stretches of emptiness, where all there is to do is look at the scenery. And yes, it's lovely scenery, but at the same time, it's not asking anything of the player.

 

Because although the 'fetch quests' grant the Inquisition power, it's not something that feels like something the Inquisitor and their Inner Circle should be personally handling - a four-star admiral is not going to hand deliver a message between a couple of ensigns (that's the best analogy I could come up with). The entire game suffers this problem, the Hinterlands just bear the brunt of it because that's the first zone we go to. EVERY zone has a good amount of quests that, really, someone of the Inquisitor's position should not be handling themselves. They should be handing off that task to like the requisitions officer or someone.

 

Precisely. You summarized in a straightforward post my rather enormous one up there.

BW did address that problem, but unfortunately, it was done in an inappropriate manner. Their solution created a second problem by filling the big open areas with quests that simply lack any importance. Or that don't make your PC feel as though he made any difference. We are the Inquisitor, after all. Are we to spend time collecting blankets and ram meat for random strangers?

 

A good example of how the player would've felt important was if our Inquisitor got to command a troop to storm the Avaar stronghold and free the imprisoned soldiers. Depending on our class, we could even command a team of archers while Cassandra lead the assault with the soldiers. The strategy could be discussed on the War Table before heading to the enemy HQ. And since we control every party member, we could tell Cassandra and her men when and where to attack and when to fall back.

 

This would introduce a new alternate combat system to be used on special missions that would use military strategy and make more sense with the PC's role. Even fighting Corypheus hand on hand was just senseless. Why not make our Inquisitor storm an old Tevinter fortress or ritual tower where he would be in hiding and coordinate three teams - rogues, mages and soldiers - making them use their different talents to disarm traps -common and magical - Corypheus could've set along the way, dispel dark magic and fight hordes of darkspawn that would be under his command?

 

The final fight could've been great, with mages or templars using their powers to weaken Corypheus while you frustrated his attempts to open another Breach by using the Anchor to affect the Orb. All the while, your soldiers would fight him and the enemy hordes -Venatori, demons,darkspawn, etc- trying to storm in his hideout. It would've been epic.