02-15-2015, 05:18 PM
It's hard to even start to express my disappointment with this game. I had played Dragon Age: Origins before, and really liked it because it was one of those old-school RPG's in the line of Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. Dragon Age 2 proved to be a major desaster, only played the demo and already hated the guts of it, and obviously for a reason.
Dragon Age Inquisition was bound to change back to a more traditional style of CRPG, and it actually did that.
So, why am I unhappy about it?
Well, where to begin. The controls are quite obviously meant for a fucking console. They did little to no effort to change that, and so the keyboard and mouse control is more than a bit awkward - for example, when walking around I need to hold the right mouse button to steer my character, or steer via the keyboard. Whoever came up with that idea deserves his... but I digress. Menus are equally weird to control. In many places, when you expect to be able to click something, you need to first move the focus to a submenu or similar bollocks in order to click. Generally horrible.
But I could live with that if the gameplay was good. Unfortunately, it isn't either. The controls during combat are equally retarded. Clicking your left mouse button performs an attack - if necessary, into thin air. You cannot just click an opponent and expect your character to attack that one. You have to manually move into the vicinity of an opponent to hit him. If you scroll out far enough, the view changes into tactical view which makes things a bit less shitty to control, but overall, there is still way too much console legacy in this; you cannot move the camera by mouse; you have to use the keyboard.
Okay, let's overlook this one as well. What is there in terms of content, story, etc? Well it starts out pretty fine. The game introduces the characters, and the setting, and then lets the player fight a few enemies to get things started. After that, you get to pick and choose what to do next. While that sounds like a good thing (After all it was a good thing in Skyrim), DAI manages to completely confuse you with its overloaded quest journal and ridiculous side quests. Continuing down the main storyline requires Power. You obtain that by doing side quests, build camp sites in the areas you unlocked, occupy landmarks, close rifts, etc. The problem with these is that there is almost always a number attached. "Build Camp (1/3)". "Gather Herbs (0/10)". "Hunt Wolves (0/10)". Notice the pattern? It's like World of Warcraft. Only that it isn't multiplayer. The amount of fluff in the game is ridiculous. Where you had real story-driven side quests in Skyrim, side quests in DAI are merely number based. Kill X amount of wolves. Fetch X amount of things.
there are people still stuck in the first area after 30 hours of playing. There is nothing that tells you when you are good to go and leave this area, since there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut path. In Skyrim, you always knew what to do next. If you felt like it, you could wander off on your own, but if you wanted to go on with the story, the way was clear. In DAI, this is not the case, and more often than now you find yourself wondering what you were doing now between all the fucking side quests.
Even worse, though, is the imbalance of the game. The first area has basic random encounters in it that can outright murder you in a single round of combat. There is no concept like combat getting more difficult the further away you are from camps or civilization. I literally had set up a camp site, walked around the corner maybe 100 meters away from my camp. All of a sudden one of my party members said "There, she's taking flight" when I was hit by a massive fireball from a motherfucking dragon. Within farting range of my own camp! The game has no concept whatsoever of realism. Within view range of your camps you will encounter enemies that you simply cannot beat. There is nothing warning you about it, you will stumble into fights that will outright end you and you will have to reload. The game does nothing to encourage exploration, quite the contrary, it punishes you for it. Add to that that there are no healing spells and only limited amount of three different potions, the game becomes just the most not-fun game I have seen in a long time.
So, is there anything good about it? Well, yeah. Sort of. The graphics are nice, and the areas are huge. You will find things like a footpath leading off into the mountains, or a stream that is flat enough so you can travel along it. The characters are well done, and the voice acting is excellent.
I would love to continue playing it, but it is just way too frustrating and way too boring for me. It is a wasted opportunity for a really great game, bogged down by bloat and game design flaws. Why it got so much universal acclaim is beyond me, but the user score of 58 on Metacritic more hits the mark. It shows to me that game reviewers are either bought out by the industry, or have completely lost touch to the real gamers, judging games by a stencil. The general pattern of adding more bloat to a game and calling it a "sandbox" is something that sadly seems to be a general trend in games. The Assassin's Creed series as well as things like Watch_Dogs greatly suffer from that, but at least in Ass Creeed you mostly had a clear-cut story you could follow and ignore the fucking fluff. You don't have that in DAI, and it actually forces you into doing a lot of the side quest.
Bottom line, if you have never played any Dragon Age game, go for the first one (Origin). That one was great, a solid CRPG with a decent story line, plus you can pick it up for around â¬20 on Steam when it isn't on sale with all DLC's (Awakening is a very good DLC as well).
Dragon Age Inquisition was bound to change back to a more traditional style of CRPG, and it actually did that.
So, why am I unhappy about it?
Well, where to begin. The controls are quite obviously meant for a fucking console. They did little to no effort to change that, and so the keyboard and mouse control is more than a bit awkward - for example, when walking around I need to hold the right mouse button to steer my character, or steer via the keyboard. Whoever came up with that idea deserves his... but I digress. Menus are equally weird to control. In many places, when you expect to be able to click something, you need to first move the focus to a submenu or similar bollocks in order to click. Generally horrible.
But I could live with that if the gameplay was good. Unfortunately, it isn't either. The controls during combat are equally retarded. Clicking your left mouse button performs an attack - if necessary, into thin air. You cannot just click an opponent and expect your character to attack that one. You have to manually move into the vicinity of an opponent to hit him. If you scroll out far enough, the view changes into tactical view which makes things a bit less shitty to control, but overall, there is still way too much console legacy in this; you cannot move the camera by mouse; you have to use the keyboard.
Okay, let's overlook this one as well. What is there in terms of content, story, etc? Well it starts out pretty fine. The game introduces the characters, and the setting, and then lets the player fight a few enemies to get things started. After that, you get to pick and choose what to do next. While that sounds like a good thing (After all it was a good thing in Skyrim), DAI manages to completely confuse you with its overloaded quest journal and ridiculous side quests. Continuing down the main storyline requires Power. You obtain that by doing side quests, build camp sites in the areas you unlocked, occupy landmarks, close rifts, etc. The problem with these is that there is almost always a number attached. "Build Camp (1/3)". "Gather Herbs (0/10)". "Hunt Wolves (0/10)". Notice the pattern? It's like World of Warcraft. Only that it isn't multiplayer. The amount of fluff in the game is ridiculous. Where you had real story-driven side quests in Skyrim, side quests in DAI are merely number based. Kill X amount of wolves. Fetch X amount of things.
there are people still stuck in the first area after 30 hours of playing. There is nothing that tells you when you are good to go and leave this area, since there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut path. In Skyrim, you always knew what to do next. If you felt like it, you could wander off on your own, but if you wanted to go on with the story, the way was clear. In DAI, this is not the case, and more often than now you find yourself wondering what you were doing now between all the fucking side quests.
Even worse, though, is the imbalance of the game. The first area has basic random encounters in it that can outright murder you in a single round of combat. There is no concept like combat getting more difficult the further away you are from camps or civilization. I literally had set up a camp site, walked around the corner maybe 100 meters away from my camp. All of a sudden one of my party members said "There, she's taking flight" when I was hit by a massive fireball from a motherfucking dragon. Within farting range of my own camp! The game has no concept whatsoever of realism. Within view range of your camps you will encounter enemies that you simply cannot beat. There is nothing warning you about it, you will stumble into fights that will outright end you and you will have to reload. The game does nothing to encourage exploration, quite the contrary, it punishes you for it. Add to that that there are no healing spells and only limited amount of three different potions, the game becomes just the most not-fun game I have seen in a long time.
So, is there anything good about it? Well, yeah. Sort of. The graphics are nice, and the areas are huge. You will find things like a footpath leading off into the mountains, or a stream that is flat enough so you can travel along it. The characters are well done, and the voice acting is excellent.
I would love to continue playing it, but it is just way too frustrating and way too boring for me. It is a wasted opportunity for a really great game, bogged down by bloat and game design flaws. Why it got so much universal acclaim is beyond me, but the user score of 58 on Metacritic more hits the mark. It shows to me that game reviewers are either bought out by the industry, or have completely lost touch to the real gamers, judging games by a stencil. The general pattern of adding more bloat to a game and calling it a "sandbox" is something that sadly seems to be a general trend in games. The Assassin's Creed series as well as things like Watch_Dogs greatly suffer from that, but at least in Ass Creeed you mostly had a clear-cut story you could follow and ignore the fucking fluff. You don't have that in DAI, and it actually forces you into doing a lot of the side quest.
Bottom line, if you have never played any Dragon Age game, go for the first one (Origin). That one was great, a solid CRPG with a decent story line, plus you can pick it up for around â¬20 on Steam when it isn't on sale with all DLC's (Awakening is a very good DLC as well).