375 réponses à ce sujet

[Addictress]

OK. That's at least intellectually coherent. But even when you've redesigned the entire game, I still don't see why that redesigned game couldn't have something like the current war table in it.

At any resource level you could add the war table missions on top for a trivial cost -- compared to standard content they're virtually free. What's the case against adding them? Put another way, cut the war table missions and what could you buy with those zots?

This argument reminds me a lot of those idiots who said that, for instance, ME3's Elcor Extraction mission "should have been" a real mission. You're not proposing anything that dumb, of course, but it still seems to rely on the same category mistake.

I liked the ME3 war table. It didn't bother me. The whole design of ME3...made it okay.

[robertthebard]

*sigh* you wouldn't show an 18-hour cut scene. You only need like... a three-frame cut scene to introduce something. And yeah, those supplementary busy work quests shouldn't take up resources, that is true. But the introductions to each major region at least should've been animated.

They were, in fact, they had full cutscenes with Scout Harding as soon as you get there.  The only thing we "missed out" on was Scout Harding actually traveling there.

[vbibbi]

Thing is that there are so many people Inquisition is trying to help and so many people wanting to get help from Inquisition the faces of many (other than constant companions) not really sticking to Inquisitor's memory also serves as a pretty fitting storytelling device. It's not that Inquisitor doesn't care about it (depending on how plays), it's just that there's so much to do, that eventually the plight of a single person gets lost in the sea of plight of others.

 

 

It is a speculation, but you have to admit that there's something happening there, isn't it? We do know that there's a lot of lyrium under Hinterlands - all of it red. It's being mined or stumbled upon all across the zone. And then there's Vallamar, which also happens to be a place where Bianca has her secret entrance for red lyrium studying and - later - mining. There's even a super-loud sound coming from under the ground the first time we enter the outpost, unlike anything we've heard before - too loud and huge to be made by regular darkspawn.

 

Heck, what if red lyrium is the reason why the main settlement there is called REDcliffe?

 

Anyway - speculation or not, it has all the good qualities of consistent storytelling and visual clueing us in - just like scattered wolves everywhere (be it statues, or packs of wolves) and Solas' wolf jawbone, which really drove me crazy the first time I played the game, ever since I've noticed it.

 

 

Lol, well - the point of exploration is to explore It'd be boring and kinda counter-productive if they just gave us everything on a silver platter. Visual overload is a thing that happens too. Still, it's not like there aren't hings we can't notice right away - like the fact that Exalted Plains, which doesn't just present bleached color palette, but also lacks environmental music... other than "static" that is really annoying after a while. Fully intentional, I'm sure - meant to convey the damage to the place the conflict brought, including damage to the Veil (hence all the demons roaming about). Its entirely different with, say, Emerald Graves - mysterious, somber, relaxing, but sad, some elvhen remains scattered about, and giant mansions of Orlesians clearly stating who currently owns the lands.

 

And one of my favorites - the Western Approach. It's INCREDIBLE. The Abyssal Rift especially - superbly menacing, dominating over already hostile and hard-to-dominate environment, like a supervolcano about to erupt. I could stare for it for hours and see it staring back (I love that we can actually find small text with reference to Nietzsche ). I just wish the banter wasn't broken there, so we could hear all the companions' reaction to the fact that despite such closeness to something so vile, life appears to be coming back on the desert, signifying that the Blight corruption may not be permanent.

I really think you're giving Bioware too much credit, and claiming their use of finite resources is more intentional than just they didn't have the time to flesh things out. I don't think that omitting interesting NPCs was a design choice to highlight our position as this powerful figure to the masses. It was because it would take too much time to create characters and have them interact with the PC. Bioware is not really subtle, it's usually fans who attribute subtlety in order to make their headcanon fit. If they really wanted to emphasize that the countless people we're saving are not memorable, they would've included a scene where an NPC comes up to us and thanks us for saving their village blah blah and the Inquisitor has the option to ask "who are you?"

 

If this were the case, we could just as easily say that the Warden didn't meet any memorable characters because they were focused on stopping the Blight and didn't talk to anyone who wouldn't bring an army to help. Or any Bioware PC wouldn't interact with anyone not in the main plot since that would distract from the mission.

 

I think Leliana mentions that the cliffs in Redcliffe are red because of the minerals in the earth there. And there has been no in game evidence that red lyrium alters the color of its environment, just a red glow of energy around things. And if the speculation supporting this environmental storytelling is correct, it will only be evident to us in hindsight, so I don't know that I consider that good storytelling. The storytelling should be evident at the time we play it, not after the next game in the series comes out and I go back and replay the game with new knowledge.

 

For environmental music or its lack, I really don't know what to think considering the issues with audio the rest of the game has. I don't see it as Bio deciding the EP should have no music to reflect the weak Veil. Heck, shouldn't all zones have no music then since each has multiple rifts?

 

... Yes, because that's all we do - find goats and lost rings. All throughout the Inquisition. It's not like those are entirely inconsequential missions that Inquisitor can entirely ignore - little things to show that the grand Inquisitor sometimes cares enough to do something tiny for a person in need, without the narrative bending over backwards to spin it into something bigger than it should be. 

 

Also - our agents find more things for us through war table missions than it is required of us to find things on our own, like Cole's amulet, or things necessary to accomplish some quests. No need to fetch it personally.

 

That, plus many of the war table missions-that-could-be-turned-quests actually take place in regions not depicted in Inquisition, which speaks volumes on why they weren't depicted as anything more - the cost of including those quests is insurmountably higher than a simple quest Inquisitor can find in zones they have access to.

It's frustrating when the war table, where we're ostensibly sending multiple agents out for one purpose, come up with less herbs/metals/leathers than we do if we're strolling through a map for the same amount of time. And when we have to wait 16 hours for a mission only to get a sword pommel, it is anticlimactic. So when we are doing these small quests or picking up notes and following their directions, it makes me wonder why we're spending the time doing this when we could be giving it to the agents who apparently can't carry more than a handful of elfroot.

 

Um, and it stays a side benefit   Just because I enjoy exploring doesn't mean that I play DA games just for exploring. I enjoy it, because it serves purposes OTHER than exploration - they flesh out the world and actually makes the pacing and story of Inquisition more believable, funny as it may sound to some.

But I thought your point was that this environmental storytelling has replaced a lot of the dialogue and narrative storytelling of previous games. So if a lot of this environmental storytelling requires a lot of exploration off the beaten path, the overall storytelling becomes more difficult, or at least more time consuming, to consume.

 

See, this is exactly the problem with the idea. You take out that finding a ring quest and you've got enough wordcount for three NPC lines and four inquisitor lines, zero cinematics, one placed standard enemy group, one unique valuable, and scripting so the game knows that you've got that item. Throw those zots onto the war table and you've got .... enough wordcount for three NPC lines and four inquisitor lines, zero cinematics, one placed standard enemy group, one unique valuable, and scripting so the game knows that you've got that item.

If you want to start putting serious stuff on the war table, you've got to either cut serious stuff from the other parts of the game, or have a fantasy budget. It's OK to propose serious cuts, of course. What would you cut?

I could easily cut half of the zones and eliminate 75% of Skyhold's customization. Eliminate mounts, or reduce it to just horses. Heck, remove half of the war table missions; it still takes resources to write them out, create a quest chain, design the rewards. Controversial, but I would be okay with human only and only one set of voices. I would also be happy removing all of these "ring quests" from every zone and only replacing them with a few better side quests. Even if the ratio was 10 ring quests to every larger quest, I would take that ratio.

 

I don't understand the argument of more content at the cost of depth and quality. I would much rather spend half the time playing a game that I really enjoyed rather than twice the amount of time playing a game I moderately enjoyed.

[Addictress]

They were, in fact, they had full cutscenes with Scout Harding as soon as you get there.  The only thing we "missed out" on was Scout Harding actually traveling there.

You still had to unlock each region the saaame waay. Through the war table. And then! I'm introduced via Harding, not through the quest.

[midnight tea]

For people like me who play for characters/personal connection & dynamics/etc...above all else, making all the NPCs indistinct and unmemorable isn't a good thing no matter how you slice it. There aren't even that many of them. It doesn't seem like a storytelling device(and I doubt the devs did it intentionally for that reason) it seems like a way to save time and put in more random timesinks for the player while putting less effort and resources into them.

 

I played DAO and I haven't seen that many NPCs that are distinct or memorable, or many that are any more distinct and memorable than what we have in DAI. It's a mere illusion stemming from differences in gameplay and story structure. Would I like to have more colorful characters or have characters with story that is more fleshed out? Of course, I'm a detail-oriented person, so more details for me please. What I got in DAI however isn't or doesn't really feel like it lacks more detail than DAO.

 

 

You're right, sometimes we also fight the same generic demons over and over when closing the 100th rift or sometimes we follow short notes around or sometimes we collect herbs or rocks or whatever for people. 

 

Since Inquisitor is the only person in Thedas able to close the rifts, are you surprised that there's a lot of it left for them to close? The tedium is fully intentional, just like in DAO there's a tedium of fighting darkspawn for the n-th time. It's not like they make darkspawn fights any more exciting - at least in case of rifts we get far more varied demon selection.

 

Also... LOL, we don't really collect that many herbs or rocks. There aren't even that many "bring x flowers" quests as people make it to be. From top of the head - there are a few (like, 3 or 4) at the very beginning of exploring Hinterlands, practically none in Fallow Mire, none on the Storm Coast, one in Crestwood if you count telling NPC that you killed the wyvern, one or two in Exalted Plains (for Dalish favor), zilch in Emerald Graves, a few that let us trigger dragon-hunting in Western Approach, none in Hissing Wastes and one in Forbidden Oasis.

 

Really... not that many. Most quests either focus on main zone objective, finding clues about the location of lyrium mines, investigating Venatori or Red Templars, finding allies (blades of Hessarian, Fairbanks), taking control over the zone or keep, ensuring safety of whole region and restoring flow of trade, getting rid of darkspawn or demons, getting rid of those allied with Cory, indirectly or not (suspicious bandit groups, Freemen of the Dales, etc) and scouring old ruins in search of secrets or ways to gain an upper hand. And if we find something else that we can bring to others, usually is alongside a bigger quest.

 

 

Are you really saying you wouldn't WANT some of those story heavy, lore heavy, interesting wartable missions to be made into actual quests? :huh:They could have easily changed some of them to be set in the parts we have access to. I know they didn't have a lot of resources left over to make sidequests, but come on.

 

Did I say anything about not wanting more story and lore-heavy quests?  No, I simply pointed out that I know why they weren't made - especially if you take into consideration that a great deal of war table missions have been written in very late into the game, at the time that things like voiceover were already done with.

 

And just out of curiosity - which of the war-table missions would you like to see to be turned to quests?

[Fiery Phoenix]

I liked the ME3 war table. It didn't bother me. The whole design of ME3...made it okay.

I would do away with the whole War Table thing if it were up to me, although at least in DA:I it made some sense (and the Dalish Inquisitor by far had the best such missions).

[midnight tea]

We should've had a high stakes mission to uncover the book of Plenix. Imagine it, on some reaper-ravaged city on Irune, fighting cannibals through the ruins and grabbing the book from the library like Indiana Jones! 

 

That... kinda sounds like Descent xD And I would like to point out that the adventure began as a war table mission

[robertthebard]

You still had to unlock each region the saaame waay. Through the war table. And then! I'm introduced via Harding, not through the quest.

Um, what?  That is the quest.  Securing a foothold/basecamp for the Inquisition, and then moving in.  Yep, you didn't get to wander around in a void, or lost in the forest for 2 months trying to find a location where there's a story arc to pursue, you sent scouts out to do that for you, and unlocked the areas via the war table.

[vbibbi]

We should've had a high stakes mission to uncover the book of Plenix. Imagine it, on some reaper-ravaged city on Irune, fighting cannibals through the ruins and grabbing the book from the library like Indiana Jones! 

You mean like the mission where we went to the facility and got the Reaper artifact from Cerberus? Or the planet where we picked up the soldier's dog tags? Or the mission where we picked up geth codes? Every single side mission in ME3 included picking up a fetch quest item and returning it to the Citadel. How would this be any different?

[Addictress]

Um, what?  That is the quest.  Securing a foothold/basecamp for the Inquisition, and then moving in.  Yep, you didn't get to wander around in a void, or lost in the forest for 2 months trying to find a location where there's a story arc to pursue, you sent scouts out to do that for you, and unlocked the areas via the war table.

This mechanism is boring. Indeed, we would have to redesign quite a lot foundationally in order to correct it.

 

Also I thought you were one of my allies. Didn't we agree on stuff before

[Addictress]

You mean like the mission where we went to the facility and got the Reaper artifact from Cerberus? Or the planet where we picked up the soldier's dog tags? Or the mission where we picked up geth codes? Every single side mission in ME3 included picking up a fetch quest item and returning it to the Citadel. How would this be any different?

Even the soldier dog tags were unique because of the way it was staged. You are dropped into a wholly unique zone JUST for those dog tags - each is precious and also presented in the midst of a ship you saw burn up with your own eyes, now dead in the snow. Even if technically a collection quest, it was staged beautifully.

[pdusen]

Okay like I said, a poorly acted scene is better than no scene at all. A scene is a scene, if it's not animated well then that's a can of worms there but you're asking me to prefer no scene at all? And Inquisition had cinematic convos for the biggest quests but by proportion it had less.

 

I'm not asking you to do anything except use the term "cinematic" correctly, or at least avoid using it wrong, which I'll note that you failed to do in the post I'm quoting.

[Addictress]

I'm not asking you to do anything except use the term "cinematic" correctly, or at least avoid using it wrong, which I'll note that you failed to do in the post I'm quoting.

Alright, you want to do this?

 

http://www.merriam-w...onary/cinematic

Which is closer to the formula of a motion picture - aka films? Countershots, or two people standing rigidly while their dialogue audio is drowned out by background noise?

 

And yes I say formula, because obviously you can make a film in which people talk that way, but that's not the standard formula for motion pictures in general.

[pdusen]

Alright, you want to do this?

 

http://www.merriam-w...onary/cinematic

Which is closer to the formula of a motion picture - aka films? Countershots, or two people standing rigidly while their dialogue audio is drowned out by background noise?

 

As you yourself pointed out earlier, we're using the technical gaming definition of "cinematic", not the film-derived adjective, so this question seems immaterial.

[vbibbi]

I played DAO and I haven't seen that many NPCs that are distinct or memorable, or many that are any more distinct and memorable than what we have in DAI. It's a mere illusion stemming from differences in gameplay and story structure. Would I like to have more colorful characters or have characters with story that is more fleshed out? Of course, I'm a detail-oriented person, so more details for me please. What I got in DAI however isn't or doesn't really feel like it lacks more detail than DAO.

 

 

Since Inquisitor is the only person in Thedas able to close the rifts, are you surprised that there's a lot of it left for them to close? The tedium is fully intentional, just like in DAO there's a tedium of fighting darkspawn for the n-th time. It's not like they make darkspawn fights any more exciting - at least in case of rifts we get far more varied demon selection.

 

And just out of curiosity - which of the war-table missions would you like to see to be turned to quests?

Memorable NPCs: the drunk blacksmith mourning his daughter who is stuck in Redcliffe castle, the dwarven thug who has Sten's sword and we have to coerce into fighting to defend Redcliffe, Bevin, the boy who wanted to be a hero and get his grandfather's sword to save his mother, the cowardly innkeeper and his long-suffering bar maid who can inherit his bar if he dies. This is in Redcliffe alone. Granted, I don't remember all of their names off the top of my head, but they stood out to me as individuals. Plus we have multiple ways of interacting with them rather than just one dialogue and leave. In Crestwood, we have the elf who wants to join the Wardens, but that's all the dialogue she has, the man looking for his friend who studies wyverns, and the mayor. Only the mayor is interesting, and that's from finding out about his past through notes and exploration, not through dialogue.

 

 

For the tedium of the rifts, it is up to the developers to decide how many rifts they want to put in each map. There was nothing saying we have to have 100+ rifts in the game to close, it's filler. It would have been more memorable for me if we had had fewer rifts that impacted the story more, like the Crestwood lake one. That's one of the few that actually has an impact on the region, most of the others don't affect people or the environment at all. I mean, we could have even not had any rifts in the game apart from the Breach; that could have been what is spitting out demons. It was shooting bolts down from it at the beginning of the game, what's to say it couldn't just constantly spit demons out and fling them to various parts of the world? That's what I assumed would happen before the game came out and we closed the Breach fairly soon.

 

That's not the same as multiple enemies we have to fight in wave after wave. Yes the Deep Roads in DAO could be a bit long, but every RPG has enemies to fight through, and it would have seemed odd if there were no darkspawn to fight in the Deep Roads.

 

 

For war table missions to use as quests, I would have liked the ones where we had to use logic to uncover the traitor in the king's court, working with the Wardens to discover who released the darkspawn from some mines, any of the Inquisitor background missions, working with either the mages or templars in their missions based on if we recruited or conscripted them. These would have shown that our choices had an impact in the game world.

[Addictress]

As you yourself pointed out earlier, we're using the technical gaming definition of "cinematic", not the film-derived adjective, so this question seems immaterial.

That is the technical definition of cinematic. You are the one attaching additional qualifiers that not only must it be a quality of motion pictures, but that is must be "good" or somehow quality" as well.

 

All we are saying when we say a scene is cinematic is that it adheres to and related to what we typically see in motion pictures. That's all.

[Nefla]

The total redesign Addictress mentioned? Sure. Sometimes the basic concept of a game just isn't for you.

But all of this has nothing at all to do with the war table missions.

It makes me sad that BioWare ends up cutting the stuff I liked about previous games in favor of stuff I don't care about .

 

The wartable missions IMO highlighted the fact that the real quests weren't fun. It made me go "why can't I do something like THIS instead?"

 

 

I played DAO and I haven't seen that many NPCs that are distinct or memorable, or many that are any more distinct and memorable than what we have in DAI. It's a mere illusion stemming from differences in gameplay and story structure. Would I like to have more colorful characters or have characters with story that is more fleshed out? Of course, I'm a detail-oriented person, so more details for me please. What I got in DAI however isn't or doesn't really feel like it lacks more detail than DAO.

There were a ton of NPCs in DA:O that were memorable and that I cared about. They had names, stories, I could see their faces, their quests enhanced the atmosphere and the lore of the place, I loved it. I would not be able to pick any DA:I NPC that you meed as part of a sidequest out of a lineup or tell you what their quest was. Each origin alone had a ton of characters that gave me a connection to the scenario and the impression of a living world. People like Zerlinda (the daughter from a mining family who had a baby with a casteless and was told to abandon him to die in the deeproads or live and die as a casteless herself) put a human(or dwarf lol) face on the situation for me and I loved that many of the DA:O quests like that had multiple ways to resolve (including being able to have Brother Burkel take her into his makeshift chantry if you did his quest previously). Chasing notes around the desert or destroying a bunch of mooks and some red lyrium just doesn't compare in my eyes.

 

 

Since Inquisitor is the only person in Thedas able to close the rifts, are you surprised that there's a lot of it left for them to close? The tedium is fully intentional, just like in DAO there's a tedium of fighting darkspawn for the n-th time. It's not like they make darkspawn fights any more exciting - at least in case of rifts we get far more varied demon selection.

They could have made rifts more rare, made each one a big deal (similar to dragon encounters) with difficult enemies, made them an actual danger to the people nearby. They shouldn't have had people living next to them as if nothing was wrong for example and closing one should have been a big deal. Instead they made them a plentiful and pointless chore. There's no reason to do it since they don't actually endanger anyone and the demons helpfully stay close to them. The only reason to do it is to grind power. Enemy variety isn't something that matters to me and the DA:I combat is not enjoyable so demon selection means nothing to me. DA:O had less combat and no power requirement that forced you to grind boring tasks.

 

Also... LOL, we don't really collect that many herbs or rocks. There aren't even that many "bring x flowers" quests as people make it to be. From top of the head - there are a few (like, 3 or 4) at the very beginning of exploring Hinterlands, practically none in Fallow Mire, none on the Storm Coast, one in Crestwood if you count telling NPC that you killed the wyvern, one or two in Exalted Plains (for Dalish favor), zilch in Emerald Graves, a few that let us trigger dragon-hunting in Western Approach, none in Hissing Wastes and one in Forbidden Oasis.

And? Not every task might have been collecting herbs specifically but they all had the same mechanic but without the packaging of character interaction, interesting storyline and so on. Find a ring, escort a Halla/goat/druffalo, go here, kill X, etc...none of that is interesting on its' own.

 

Really... not that many. Most quests either focus on main zone objective, finding clues about the location of lyrium mines, investigating Venatori or Red Templars, finding allies (blades of Hessarian, Fairbanks), taking control over the zone or keep, ensuring safety of whole region and restoring flow of trade, getting rid of darkspawn or demons, getting rid of those allied with Cory, indirectly or not (suspicious bandit groups, Freemen of the Dales, etc) and scouring old ruins in search of secrets or ways to gain an upper hand. And if we find something else that we can bring to others, usually is alongside a bigger quest.

Go to zone, read note after note that says "the inquisition is on to us, move to the next spot," kill whoever's at that spot with no dialogue or interaction, read the next note, repeat. It's just more boring insubstantial tasks strung together. The only one that was slightly interesting to me was the Crestwood one but even that fell flat compared to what I would expect from BioWare's other games. I don't care about looking at pretty maps and I don't like the combat so unless the quest has some substance I will not enjoy it.

 

Did I say anything about not wanting more story and lore-heavy quests?  No, I simply pointed out that I know why they weren't made - especially if you take into consideration that a great deal of war table missions have been written in very late into the game, at the time that things like voiceover were already done with.

It definitely seemed like you were arguing against the inclusion of more story-heavy quests and found the current ones fine.

 

 

And just out of curiosity - which of the war-table missions would you like to see to be turned to quests?

Honestly I don't remember. The last time I played DA:I (other than Trespasser) was December of 2014 but I had that impression at the time. "Why can't I do THIS instead? Why do I have to retrieve bear hides and such?" Anyway it wouldn't have to be a specific wartable quest but something in the same style with intrigue and detail.

[AedanStarfang]

I would like to see Dragon Age Origins with Inquisition's aesthetic, so basically a blending of the two.

[AlanC9]

I could easily cut half of the zones and eliminate 75% of Skyhold's customization. Eliminate mounts, or reduce it to just horses. Heck, remove half of the war table missions; it still takes resources to write them out, create a quest chain, design the rewards. Controversial, but I would be okay with human only and only one set of voices. I would also be happy removing all of these "ring quests" from every zone and only replacing them with a few better side quests. Even if the ratio was 10 ring quests to every larger quest, I would take that ratio.

I don't see what cutting half of the war table missions would get you. You'd make the war table a lot worse, but you wouldn't gain much value elsewhere.

The other things do strike me as reasonable alternative resource allocations. Note that the 10-1 swap of sidequest types would result in an awful lot of empty space; in effect, this would be moving from something like Skyrim to something like Morrowind, which I'm not saying is a bad idea. Alternatively, the areas themselves could be shrunk too, which would make this proposal tantamount to going back to DA:O area design.

I don't understand the argument of more content at the cost of depth and quality. I would much rather spend half the time playing a game that I really enjoyed rather than twice the amount of time playing a game I moderately enjoyed.

Well, as they used to say about the Soviet military, "quantity has a quality all its own." Some folks like the huge maps with lots of stuff to do. I guess you could say that they're judging quality differently from us.

[AlanC9]

The wartable missions IMO highlighted the fact that the real quests weren't fun. It made me go "why can't I do something like THIS instead?"

Yeah, that's how the ME3 EMS arguments always turned out too. The problem was never actually with the galaxy map stuff; the real complaint was with the rest of the game.

[robertthebard]

This mechanism is boring. Indeed, we would have to redesign quite a lot foundationally in order to correct it.

 

Also I thought you were one of my allies. Didn't we agree on stuff before

Agreeing on one point doesn't preclude us from disagreeing on something else.  We happen to disagree here.  There is plenty of show and tell on the war table.  Dislike for it notwithstanding, it's hard to deny that it's there.  Taken in context with the nature of the game, it actually makes a lot sense that it works the way it works:

 

We are either leading or a member of the inner circle of a  major organization.  There have been entire threads dedicated to the fact that some people believe we're out in the world too much, some of these not without merit.  It behooves us, however, to send out scouts to be sure that an area is secure "enough" for us to go and do whatever it is we're needing to do there.  Even generals that tend to lead from the front aren't the first boots on the ground, they send in scouts and combat engineers to clear a base camp first.

[Addictress]

Agreeing on one point doesn't preclude us from disagreeing on something else.  We happen to disagree here.  There is plenty of show and tell on the war table.  Dislike for it notwithstanding, it's hard to deny that it's there.  Taken in context with the nature of the game, it actually makes a lot sense that it works the way it works:

 

We are either leading or a member of the inner circle of a  major organization.  There have been entire threads dedicated to the fact that some people believe we're out in the world too much, some of these not without merit.  It behooves us, however, to send out scouts to be sure that an area is secure "enough" for us to go and do whatever it is we're needing to do there.  Even generals that tend to lead from the front aren't the first boots on the ground, they send in scouts and combat engineers to clear a base camp first.

Making sense and being a crappy way to tell a story are not mutually exclusive.

[midnight tea]

I really think you're giving Bioware too much credit, and claiming their use of finite resources is more intentional than just they didn't have the time to flesh things out. I don't think that omitting interesting NPCs was a design choice to highlight our position as this powerful figure to the masses. It was because it would take too much time to create characters and have them interact with the PC. Bioware is not really subtle, it's usually fans who attribute subtlety in order to make their headcanon fit. If they really wanted to emphasize that the countless people we're saving are not memorable, they would've included a scene where an NPC comes up to us and thanks us for saving their village blah blah and the Inquisitor has the option to ask "who are you?"

 

Uuuuh, my responses are getting too long to not consider spoilering some for length

 

Spoiler

This claim, I'd like to point out, is a double-edged sword. The same way I may give them too much credit when it comes to DAI applied to the credit gives to the devs who created DAO.

 

Still, this is a matter that is irrelevant to my point - the fact remains that even you recognize that the way things are emphasize the themes that are there, fully and consciously explored in DAI.

 

Also - we actually HAVE NPC scenes/dialogues where Inquisitor either admits or can admit that they hardly recognize anyone. And not even random NPCs, but people who work for them. First is the Iron Bull's scene just after we reach Skyhold - they talk with soldiers, and not only Inquisitor admits that he didn't think who those soldiers are or what is their perspective, the fact that Inquisitor doesn't have an ability to know every person they work with or help was a point of the scene.

 

Another is Sutherland - you can totally have "uh, who are you?" reaction, and completely squander his potential by having Leliana send him to the kitchens or something.

 

I think Leliana mentions that the cliffs in Redcliffe are red because of the minerals in the earth there. And there has been no in game evidence that red lyrium alters the color of its environment, just a red glow of energy around things. And if the speculation supporting this environmental storytelling is correct, it will only be evident to us in hindsight, so I don't know that I consider that good storytelling. The storytelling should be evident at the time we play it, not after the next game in the series comes out and I go back and replay the game with new knowledge.

 

Totally untrue, especially in an ever expanding SERIES that entails more than games, none of which are self-contained. There were details both in DAO and DA2 that made only sense in context of what DAI has revealed.

 

Hindsight and recontextualization is a powerful storytelling tool too - how many people you think have replayed the game just to see Soals and what he said in new light, for example?

 

Or Flemeth, after the DAI reveal?

 

 

For environmental music or its lack, I really don't know what to think considering the issues with audio the rest of the game has. I don't see it as Bio deciding the EP should have no music to reflect the weak Veil. Heck, shouldn't all zones have no music then since each has multiple rifts?

 

Unlike other zones EP has been a regular battlefield long before the Breach appeared. Demons walk about the place with no restrictions (unlike demons from other zones) we can basically stumble upon them everywhere, not just around the rifts, and Solas basically tells us that the region has seen so much slaughter that demons will haunt it for ages to come. Whether the unpleasant "static" of a music signifies weakened Veil or just underlines just how utterly wasted that region is doesn't change the fact that it adds to the intentional unpleasantness of the zone. This is not a place made to look or feel pretty.

 

 

 

 

It's frustrating when the war table, where we're ostensibly sending multiple agents out for one purpose, come up with less herbs/metals/leathers than we do if we're strolling through a map for the same amount of time. And when we have to wait 16 hours for a mission only to get a sword pommel, it is anticlimactic. So when we are doing these small quests or picking up notes and following their directions, it makes me wonder why we're spending the time doing this when we could be giving it to the agents who apparently can't carry more than a handful of elfroot.

 

True, I'd like to see more mats being brought by agents, but I'd like to point out that Trespasser actually made many war table spoils more interesting. And ever since the beginning we could only get some unique schematics or equipment just via war table missions.

 

 

But I thought your point was that this environmental storytelling has replaced a lot of the dialogue and narrative storytelling of previous games. So if a lot of this environmental storytelling requires a lot of exploration off the beaten path, the overall storytelling becomes more difficult, or at least more time consuming, to consume.

 

It's arguable whether DAI actually replaced much. We'd have to get into details and differences between game and their structures, and I certainly have no head space for that now 

 

I could easily cut half of the zones and eliminate 75% of Skyhold's customization. Eliminate mounts, or reduce it to just horses. 

 

You realize that Skyhold customization and reskins for mounts are an entirely different area of the game that has absolutely nothing to do with the narrative and was never even touched by the writers? You cannot seriously confuse art department's work to others', especially that most of the time you're not even talking about gameplay, or story... but reskins! That is nowhere near the cost of crafting narrative.

 

Besides, we heard from David Gaider that whether there would be less zones or not, it would have no impact on the length of the crit path.

 

Heck, remove half of the war table missions; it still takes resources to write them out, create a quest chain, design the rewards. Controversial, but I would be okay with human only and only one set of voices. I would also be happy removing all of these "ring quests" from every zone and only replacing them with a few better side quests. Even if the ratio was 10 ring quests to every larger quest, I would take that ratio.

 

Majority of those war table missions has been written while most of the work of the game has already been done. And it may take resources to write them out... but how many resources do you think it takes to write the dialogue (minding the word budget), hire at least 2 or 3 VOs to voices (and then translate them and hire VOs for German or French VO and all the work that comes with it), designing NPCs, animating possible cutscenes, finding or building new place in the zone, designing enemies and rewards and so on?

 

Like... I am not a game dev, nor I claim to know much about dev work, but it doesn't take an expert to see some problems here.

 

Also - there aren't even that many "ring quests" in DAI to begin with. There are 2 about rings specifically, but the entire amount of similar quests IS about 10. Really, at this point I have to ask whether you paid attention to any zone side-quest at all...

[Abyss108]

Making sense and being a crappy way to tell a story are not mutually exclusive.

 

Wasn't crappy for me, was my favourite feature of the game.

 

Also, I don't remember any of these "memorable" side quests from Origins that people keep mentioning.

[midnight tea]

Memorable NPCs: the drunk blacksmith mourning his daughter who is stuck in Redcliffe castle, the dwarven thug who has Sten's sword and we have to coerce into fighting to defend Redcliffe, Bevin, the boy who wanted to be a hero and get his grandfather's sword to save his mother, the cowardly innkeeper and his long-suffering bar maid who can inherit his bar if he dies. This is in Redcliffe alone. Granted, I don't remember all of their names off the top of my head, but they stood out to me as individuals. Plus we have multiple ways of interacting with them rather than just one dialogue and leave. In Crestwood, we have the elf who wants to join the Wardens, but that's all the dialogue she has, the man looking for his friend who studies wyverns, and the mayor. Only the mayor is interesting, and that's from finding out about his past through notes and exploration, not through dialogue.

 

That's... not exactly honest thing you do here. Since we have Redcliffe both in DAO and DAI, why mention people from Crestwood - a much smaller and less significant village with smaller amount of inhabitants? Why not mention all the mages (tranquil we can hire, Lysas or Linnea) we can talk with extensively in DAI's Redcliffe, and that despite the fact that it's not any sort of bigger quest hub compared to DAO? What about Connor who we can actually talk too if he survived and can see turn into demon in future Redcliffe? What about inhabitants of Haven or Skyhold? All of them distinct personalities and stories, including at least 2 rather big a-holes we can either save or not bother.

 

 

For the tedium of the rifts, it is up to the developers to decide how many rifts they want to put in each map. There was nothing saying we have to have 100+ rifts in the game to close, it's filler. It would have been more memorable for me if we had had fewer rifts that impacted the story more, like the Crestwood lake one. That's one of the few that actually has an impact on the region, most of the others don't affect people or the environment at all. I mean, we could have even not had any rifts in the game apart from the Breach; that could have been what is spitting out demons. It was shooting bolts down from it at the beginning of the game, what's to say it couldn't just constantly spit demons out and fling them to various parts of the world? That's what I assumed would happen before the game came out and we closed the Breach fairly soon.

 

So we should ignore the fact that rifts in the Veil appeared even before the Breach and that the Breach - according to Solas, its creator - has weakened the Veil and the changes to it likely felt all across the world? The Breach isn't even that important to the story as the Veil as a whole is; at this point we don't even know if we're going to be defending or tearing it down in the next game, but we do know that it will be essential to the story, given that it's basically what created and guarantees existence of Thedas in shape as we know it and we just found out that its creator wants to get rid of it.

 

Heck, it's almost a character in itself now and in DAI at least, the Inquisitor is its appointed tender. Traveling the world and sealing rifts is their job now, as well as reason why the world needs them, or why the job is difficult, or perhaps even futile at the end.

 

 

That's not the same as multiple enemies we have to fight in wave after wave. Yes the Deep Roads in DAO could be a bit long, but every RPG has enemies to fight through, and it would have seemed odd if there were no darkspawn to fight in the Deep Roads.

 

What is odd is that you only mention Deep Roads, while most darkspawn has been lured on a surface by Archdemon. A lot of ambushes us on roads and a great deal of enemies we have to fight in various places throughout the game. Not that it's a bad point against the game - it was a game about the Blight and hordes of darskpawn attacking everything after all. I find it bizarre though that you try and make it look as something different than it was and somehow better than a large number of rifts. Those were the enemies designed to be shown to overwhelm us with numbers, even if for different reasons.