f13.net

Because it's never too soon for me to hurfblurf about Bioware RPGs.

Starting the thread now because some details have leaked:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=486787

It is probably too early to call anything spoilery, but there's a bunch of character concept art and a little plot blurb about the setting, from a customer survey. TLDR version of the linked thread: everyone who was speculating you play as a Chantry Inquisitor in the 3rd one gets a gold star, and the character designs don't appear to be changing significantly.

DA 3: The Inquisition (what a show!  The Inqui-si-tion!)

Nobody expects the DA Inquisition!

Wondering about gameplay. I JUST finished DA1 last week (waiting for GW2 does odd things to one's playing habits  :why_so_serious:) and combat was getting kind of repetitive/simplistic by early midgame. What direction are they taking for this game? (I've never played DA2, so yeah)

A lot of people disliked the combat in DA2, it was probably the 2nd most complained about thing in the game after the level asset reuse. So, if I had to hazard a guess I'd say they're likely to swing the pendulum somewhat back towards DA1's more traditional combat, while hopefully keeping the more engaging fighter and rogue stuff from 2.

But really that's just guessing. I know they've said they're going to change it up some based on the feedback they got from 2 but I don't think they've said how.

Well, as long as they aren't turning it into QTE combat, I'll be cautiously optimistic. The larger group size hints at potentially more tactical engagements ala BG2 (hopefully without the bullshit mage protection spell minigames)... I'm just hoping they add some more choices/depth to their character system, DA1 was a bit light in this regard.

Well, I would hesitate to assume that "5 person party" means 5 people in the group at once. I hope that it does, but it could just as easily mean only 5 recruitable characters or whatever.

The OP in that Neogoaf thread cites "up to ten complex companions" so '5 person party' likely ain't that. Since DA could handle 5 person squad with either permanent dog mod or with ranger summon creature(s) out, it wouldn't be too unlikely in DA3, i guess.

Ah, so it does. Well that's good, the characters are pretty much the thing they do best, so glad to see them expanding that back up a bit.

I would be pleased to have more space in my party, yeah. I didn't notice any dwarves in the companion concept art, though.  :heartbreak:

I liked both DA:O and DA2, but they felt like completely different games in different worlds. That was conscious on their part. My chief complaint was asset reuse in 2, but I thought the combat was fine.

They did announced how impressed they were with Skyrim, and hinted that this could impact their thinking on DA3. But right now, 3 could be anything. The biggest thing for me will be whether they decide you are the story (like Origins) or you are just playing their main character (like 2). Origins was an homage to older school RPGs, but 2 is easier to turn into a transmedia franchise.

Played everything so far to death but I was so frustrated with the most recent material and so uncomfortable with Mass Effect 3 that I feel like I'm going to sit back on my hands on this one for a bit unless I feel overwhelming reason to do otherwise. Which doesn't mean some Kotaku asshole creaming his pants or whatever.

I'm sure Sjofn will have a review of at least 4 character arcs a month into release for you.  :oh_i_see:

I actually prefer DA2 combat. It was over the top in terms of animation, but I loved playing a rogue. I don't remember any fondness for playing a warrior or mage tho.

Yeah I liked the pace and mechanics of it a little better overall I'd say. The DLC did a lot to improve the 'feel' of it with masking how the waves spawned in, etc., too. Still kind of bitter the later DLCs for it got cancelled.

I also prefered DA2's combat (just put tactical view back in and tone down the animations and I'd be pretty much as happy as could be). The mage in particular was much more fun (to me) than it was in DA:O. I never actually finished a mage playthrough of DA:O, but I had two mage Hawkes that finished.  :why_so_serious: The archer rogue was probably my favorite, though.

I really, really, really hope they keep the branching trees of DA2 (or improve on that concept somehow) rather than regress to the way DA:O was, too. My 2h warriors in DA:O were all the same, my 2h warriors in DA2 had some variety, for example.

This branching trees thing does sound interesting. DA1 character development (of the 'stats' kind) was honestly kind of dull, even for a mage... and much moreso for my thieves/warriors. Dog had a whopping 8 skills total, but I think his portrait could be replaced with a trollface anyway  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, the way it worked in DA2 was a little different. You still had your little categories, but it was a web instead of linear, and you had way more choices. Like here's a screenshot of the warrior trees (although the specialization trees (like templar) aren't displayed, I think it's from an early-ish build):

(http://cdn.staticmultimedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/DragonAge2-skill-tree1.jpg)

I thought the build diversity and by extension combat was actually pretty well done in DA:2.  The re-use of art assets however really killed that game for me, by the time I was done I knew the wounded coast better than my upstairs bedroom.

Indeed, that and the nonsensical railroaded ending were the only large faults I could find with Dragon Age 2.

Of course I need to add that if they do not put this on Steam I will never play it because fuck Origins.

That character ability tree definitely looks more interesting than the DA1 one. My main beef with DA1 was that the gameplay of each character archetype (except mages, maybe) didn't change all that much from level 8 to level 20, assuming you got the REALLY important abilities first; the other abilities were just 'make your existing abilities kill shit betterer' sustained abilities or passives.


... and oh fuck, I forgot about Origin. Hopefully they'll come to their senses and put it on Steam as well -- though with the recent origin-vs-steam hatefest, it doesn't seem likely.

You won't see it on Steam. Just ignore the game or accept that it's origin or nothing.

It will be nothing for a lot of people.

Well... Origin, Amazon, a store, or nothing.

The question would be if you have to have an Origin account no matter where you buy it.

ME3 on the PC requires an Origin account so I would say that DA3 on the PC will require one too.

Yeah, that does seem likely. Console is an option too, of course.

Just say no to DA3!

Origin was pretty much invisible when I was playing ME3.  I don't imagine it'll be much of a problem here.  I might even buy it off Origin.   :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, it isn't as convenient as having all my games in the same launcher but it works fine. It's how I bought TSW.

I don't have the visceral origin hate unlike some people (:awesome_for_real:) and I did buy SWTOR through it.. though I never had to install it to play SWTOR, obv. Have they reined in the spyware/rootkit aspect?

Otherwise it'd have to be a brick-and-mortar copy for me, which is a shaky (and overpriced) proposition in Hungary. Ohwells!

Yeah the re-use of maps was pretty brutal (something they attempted to address in the the DLCs) (seriously if you liked DA2, you'll like the DLCs a lot) and probably my biggest gripe as well, although having to visit my party members in their houses for them to have a five line conversation with me is way up there too.

How does the ME3 DLC work?  Can you buy it with real money on Origin?  Or do you need to buy EA monopoly money first?

Don't know for sure yet as all DLC so far has been free. However for the previous games you pay for the DLCs with real money for the PC rather than using BioWare points.

I also hope they bring Varric back.  I thought he was one of the most well-written and entertaining characters I've seen in a modern CRPG.  He's like the dwarf Han Solo.

Pretty sure I had to buy BioWare points for my PC DLCs.

Yeah, all my ME2 DLC and the one thing I bought for DA1 had to be done with Bioware Points.

Well that was all pre-Origin right? I don't know if they still use the same old crappy website method for buying DLC now.

Yeah I'm wrong it is BioWare points only for the previous games' DLC for the PC. We'll still have to wait and see with Origin being required for ME3 how it'll work for the paid ME3 DLC.

We'll know in a few days but I still feel like speculating :-)

Origin allows e-comm check out and credit account management right in the client. For example, I can buy three add ons for BF3. Plus, all other ME3 DLCs have been "purchased" (for Free) using the same mechanism and then patched right from Origin. So if ME3 is going to be pay, I'll go with PC users paying for it through Origin.

Having explored that, I can quit out of Origin again... damned task bar storefronts.

Shit, I realized I bought the Prothean DLC back when it released, but I cannot for the life of me remember how I paid for it.

BW Points:

http://social.bioware.com/page/me3-dlc

See, before we get into DLC and all that, this is why I really hate proprietary shit like this: you end up leaving little bits of unused money all over the place and can't even remember where it is or what you did with it, if anything.

Hmm. Did Origin come out before ME3? I have this memory of having to quit out of ME3 to get the earlier add-ons (like, I can imagine doing that for From Ashes) But then the most recent ones (e.g. Extended Cut, Earth) and all the earlier ones, all are now in Origin.

Yes Origin came out before ME3.

Yeah the points thing is irritating. At least the Bioware points come in the same amounts as the things you buy with them cost, but still.

Yes, Origin has been around since mid 2011.  

I missed this.  I wonder how much of EA's beef with Steam is over this monopoly money bullshit.  If they're sticking to it even after they have origin then it must be a pretty profitable scam.

EA's beef with steam is that they don't like giving other people money.

That isn't really a criticism in itself, but best not to start dressing it up.

Sort of. While true they don't want to give people money, they didn't mind going it on the actual games. The beef was in fact over DLC revenue sharing. EA wanted to keep all that money in house, and Valve demands a percentage for hosting it along with the primary game.

DLC in general is causing a ton of problems with the AAA community, both on the revenue sharing side, and on the consumer acceptance side. It is short term profitable, which leads many developers to like the concept. However, it's unproven as to the long term impact of such schemes on the "franchise" approach of development when consumers know they will be nickel-and-dimed constantly. I'd almost compare it to the Airline industry and bag fees. There are unintended consequences of DLC that the publishers and developers aren't taking into account.

No, they want Origin to be an actual thing so they can make barrow loads of cash from the retail step in the chain, and unless Origin has exclusives it won't be.

They aren't wrong btw, Steam would not be dominating if it weren't for HL2, TF2, Portal. What do you think DOTA is here to do?

Technically it isn't EA's beef with Steam, it is Steam's beef with EA. Valve pulled DA2 et. al. because EA wouldn't agree to sell DLC through Steam.

Exactly.

That was my point though.  They aren't making the DLC available on Origin.  That's pretty god damn odd.  They're going up against Steam but they're going to waste possible Origin exclusives on their monopoly money scheme?

As a consumer my frustration was that DLC is pretty much ALWAYS a scam.  Especially release day DLC, which just fucking screams "we are greedy hacks who are trying to screw you out of money by holding back content."  If as much effort went into game polish as went into re-jiggering the game so they could hold back content that should have been there to begin with and figuring out new stupid ways to "monetize" every damn thing Bioware wouldn't be in the position they are in (which is pretty much riding a failwave IMHO).  

I don't mind the way companies like Bethesda are handling DLC.  Their DLC is usually quite substantive and they make it easy to get, and it eventually all goes on sale a year or two down the line so if you are willing to wait a year or two you can get it for a couple of bucks.  Bioware's entire model is ridiculous.  Basically you need to buy some other currency (which must be purchase from an entirely different place than where you got the game) then you have to figure out how to download and install it, because it doesn't do that automatically.

I bought both DA1 and DA2 via steam, and I don't get any of the DLC through Steam.  I am not going to wade through 10 webpages of bullshit to buy "Bioware bux" so i can use that to download DLC that doesn't even function through Steam.  I refuse to use Origin's because my experience with SWTOR was so terrible I actually took the time to write a complaint letter.  And now you all are saying you can't get DLC through Origin's (the ONLY mechanism by which you can purchase this game online)?  I'm sorry but that is just clownshoes of epic proportions.  Management should be fired over this, they are costing both EA and Bioware a truckload of sales.

Protip:  make it easy for me to buy your shit and I may consider (even if it is in a moment of weakness) buying your shit.  Make it a pain in the ass and I am going to actively avoid you.  

(I apologize for the language but this really gets me incensed)

Isn't that the same Bethesda responsible for the horse armour meme?

On DLC in general, the day 1 DLC that acts as a transparent scheme to circumvent the customer's right of first sale irritates me, and using bioware's godawful download system irritated me even more. OTOH paid DLC I don't care about because I can almost never be bothered to buy it. There are enough other games in the world.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1143749/ArmoredTroll.png)

According to EA. Not that I'd be surprised, since selling the base game on steam but keeping all the DLC exclusive to their own competing store was basically just trying to siphon off Steams user base.

I like the current setup. I barely notice EA titles now.

Also read the announcement that EA expects all games to have a substantial online / social component so it will be interesting to see how that affects DA3.

Yeah, didn't really feel like EA were terribly upset when they got an excuse to pull out of steam...

Not that I really blame them. There is a reason you don't see half life, portal, or tf2 on Origin.

Yeah it's because Origin sucks.

I'm not actually sure that's a new thing - DA:O technically has a social/online component, as did DA2; at face value the statement, might mean nothing at all is different for DA3. Or maybe it means ME3-type multiplayer tacked on (which I am all for, as ME3's multiplayer was great.)

ME3 multiplayer would be really entertaining with either DA engine.  It would lend itself a bit better to DA2's combat implementation.

Some official tidbits of info from today's blog:

http://blog.bioware.com/2012/09/17/a-blog-from-mark-darrah-dragon-age-iii-inquisition/

Bioware will really have to pull out some serious stops to get me on board with DA3.

I was thinking similar, though in my head it sounded more like this:
"Bioware will really have to pull out some serious stops to get me to forget DA2, all their facebook bullshit, the ending of ME3, DA2, SW:Tor, DA2"


Though I do notice they say the developers are mostly from DA1, wasn't that the case with DA2 as well and they're just trying to gloss over all the shit that came out with DA2 by making sure to mention DA:O an extra time?

They are pandering. Mike Laidlaw was the lead designer on DA:O, and on DA2. He addressed the issues of DA2 as: "There are some things I think that are certainly fair criticisms: the re-use of the levels is something we knew was a bit of a risk, but we wanted to make sure there was more content rather than less, so re-using some of the spaces and coming to them again was certainly one we were careful about and tried to re-use as artfully as we could."

To me, he's saying they were pushed for time in a tactful way. I think DA2 was a byproduct of the EA push-it-out-the-door shit we hated. One of the reasons DA:O was so well done was due to the fact it's development cycle was well underway before the EA takeover. Same thing with the original Mass Effect. EA's poisoned the well, and I don't think they can get control back.

Ok that's what I thought but wanted to make sure I remembered right.

This thread keeps reminding me I haven't played DA2 and want to pick it up on a Steam sale...oh wait

I read some line in all the press that said that they were "looking at" open-world games like Skyrim for inspiration.  That is interesting to me.

That said, no matter how interesting it is, ^.  No steam, no buy.

Less than excited about Frostbite 2, especially if the game is structurally similar to DA2 (which I wouldn't mind in other respects!) as the load times would probably make me want to punch something.

On the other hand, I'll probably have an SSD by then as they're already sub-$1/GB now. Also pretty.

Frostbite 2 has some pretty crazy loadtimes as far as BF3 goes but that's loading well, fairly gigantic maps usually. If they went back to the sorta realistic visuals rather than the heavily stylized stuff from DA2 it'd be a good engine to use since it can do some really amazing landscapes and believable skyboxes that give a good feeling of not being boxed in.

I have played zero games in any version of Frostbite, it looks like.

One piece of information that I didn't know was that Brent Knowles resigned during the development of DA:2 even though he worked on DA:O. When asked why he said, "I'm not the same person I was when I started, and BioWare is not the same company."

When you look at the development cycle of DA2 it was only worked on seriously for about a year. Skyrim was developed in earnest for over 3 years. Trying to copy or create the open-ended style of Skyrim in the time frame that EA will impose on the project is impossible. For that to happen, Dragon Age 3 would have to be released in 2014.

To illustrate that point further, DA:O was announced in 2004.

BioWare founders' retirements moved to here:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22628.0

There's some mentions on BW forums from BW folks to the effect development of DA3 has been going for two years already. Exactly what work that involved is anyone's guess though -- and applying basic math to these claims leads to some funny results, like conclusion it'd have to mean DA2 and DA3 were developed basically in parallel. So... pinch of salt and all that -- after all when there was concerns raised before DA2 launch over the size of the game and whether it'd mean something regarding game's size/variety etc, the BW guys would insist with straight face it's just a result of how much better they'd gotten at compressing their game assets...

New information out today, as there's an article in September's Game Informer:

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/08/06/september-2013-dragon-age-inquisition-6119.aspx

Things worth noting:

- Multiple choices of race for the PC are back
- Mounts (to go with the bigger open areas we already knew about)
- destructible/rebuildable environments to at least some degree
- organization/stronghold building, maybe along the lines of AC2 stuff?

Some possibly spoilery bits about companions:

After DA2, ME3 and SWTOR, this game could promise blowjobs and unicorns - still not preordering.

Still, unicorns would be rather nice.

Hate when that horn jabs you in the belly though.

Where on earth is Nayr?  This thread should be twice as long by now.

Thanks for trying to get my thread locked, Reg.  :oh_i_see:

Main site updated, not a lot of new info but a couple tidbits:

- tactical view is back for combat
- 9 party members (more than I was expecting)
- NPCs apparently interact with each other more and not just you (someone's been playing Fire Emblem?)
- Color customization for gear (also for followers)

http://www.dragonage.com/

Or Mass Effect :awesome_for_real:

Maybe. I get the impression they mean a little more than what happens in Mass Effect, since that sort of stuff also happens in DA2 which would make it not a very new/interesting feature if it is just like that.

Yeah Mass Effect 3's companions and Dragon Age 2's companions are about the same as far as interactiveness-with-each-other goes, I think. ME3 had all the Normandy Banter and occasional in-the-mission chit chat, DA2 had all the out-in-the-world banter plus the occasional "Isabella is visiting Aveline because they're totes BFFs now" cut scene. As long as it's at least that level of interaction, I am pleased. I will be even more pleased if it's MOAR, of course.

But the stupid thing that has me way too pleased is the return of Tactical View. I missed it more than I expected in DA2.

9 party members seems like.. a lot.  Is that 9 in combat at once or just what you have to choose from?

It says 'chosen from 9' I'm guessing they mean there are 9 companions you can recruit but only take 3 into combat.

Personally I think party of 9 would be great, because that is functionally equivalent to having more buttons to push. But given the probable desire to pander to consoles and their inadequate input devices and UI, it seems very unlikely.

I couldn't see it on the site but I assume this is origin only, so will anyway need to be robot Jesus to drag me in.

Green?

I'd much prefer a party of three and a fun tactical combat than a party of 9 and one that replaces strategy for complexity and complication.

Almost certainly the number of people you can pick from. Screenshots already show that you get a 4 person party actually with you at any time IIRC. (With you presumably being one of them.)

Not green.

If they try seriously to make a nine person party work I would buy this on Origin. I appreciate 4 is probably a wiser, low risk path, but 9 at least introduces a new element.

And more buttons are always better as I have discussed before, even if most philistines around here disagree.

X-com never suffered from larger parties in combat. Nor did Pools of Radiance, FF:T, Rainbow 6 before they fucked it up. Chess has you manage a party of 16.

Yeah, bu tHen you have to go turn based which is booooooring,man.  I a want to kill shit now and watch it explode like those awesome mike bay movies.


Lots of green.

BG2 had six, nine could be fun. It would be like your own personal raid all the time.

4 person party is fine.  3 was just a bit too small.  I still like the 6 person infinity engine parties, but 4 is workable. With 4 and 9 to choose from, they can kill people off and still have enough for the inevitable "dual party" section of the end section.

We can probably expect one of the 9 to be one of those 'buy it new and you get the DLC they're in free' like Shale and Sebastian, also. When you add those in, DA:O had 9 options (if you include Dog) and DA2 sort of had 9, except 2 of them were exclusive with each other (siblings) so I guess 9 isn't a jump up in number to pick from like I was thinking.

Disagree. The recent xcom with fewer party members was far richer in tactical gameplay than the originals. Also as others have said you're talking about a few turn based systems there. In Chess you take one action each turn, and half your units are identical.

I'd much rather a simple tactically deep system than lots of party members and just a appearance of it. Limitation breeds challenge too - and is much less time intensive to design and balance to boot.

Yeah fuck party. The Witcher and Skyrim is more engaging tactically than any Bioware RPG ever put together once they went next-gen.
Look at Knights of Old Republic tactical options Oh my ! WHAT FORCE POWER DO I RAPE WITH NOW!

You have a natural knack for the strawman.

If you are suggesting a larger party means you'd have make it turn based, I'm not sure I completely agree, but even if true, that's a bit like saying you can't have jelly because you'd also have to have ice cream.

I'm OK with getting another good thing to support the first good thing.

I go get that it would make a very different game though.

I'd like a game with a large party and the ability to script their behaviour in combat (something like FF12 gambits... but better).

I like large parties - allows you more flexibility to use more non-core character types. In Icewind Dale 1/2, after I cover my fighter, wizard, thief, and healer bases, I can slot in other stuff like dual-classed Fighter-Druids and Bards.

I'm ok with large parties if it's turn based. Because, ya know, I'm a market and goddamit i will be served!

DA:O scripting was actually pretty good. With a little polish you could turn it into an interesting large party thing without reverting to turn based.

That said have no problem with the play out 5 seconds and pause to change orders style. I know some people dislike that, but some people are vegetarians, what I am saying is there's no accounting for taste.

If you count people who are exclusive with other people, DAO had ten.

I don't really count Tenth Character, but I wouldn't fight too hard if people said the siblings don't really count either.


That said, Bioware probably counts them. :P

Bioware goes "fuck it, importing saves, especially when there's a new generation of consoles coming out, is a pain in the ass" and decides the best way to deal with it is this:

http://blog.bioware.com/2013/08/28/the-dragon-age-keep/

I don't mind, given the issues just importing from DA:O to DA2 had. Gives 'em a chance to just start fresh with that. Plus I get to see what decisions they actually think are important.   PLUS it means if there's a certain set of decisions I didn't make in DA:O that I kinda want to see how they play out in DA:I, I don't have to go back and play it like I would've with Mass Effect (I never had a full renegade save from ME1 because I just could not go back to it after ME2, for example :P).

Also nice for people who didn't play the previous games. This seems like a really good feature on balance.

Well, considering that in ME and DA the actions you took in previous games had no consequences, not much has been lost.

The consequences may be minimal, but me negotiating a peace between the Quarians and the Geth disagrees with there being no consequences in Mass Effect.

And the people complaining that not everybody could get that outcome may be the reason why developers would be wary about too far-reaching consequences.

Man, seriously.

NOTHING I DO MATTERS

WAIT, WHY COULDN'T I DO IT THAT WAY, WHY ARE YOU PUNISHING MEEEEE

I mean ultimately, the end of ME3 made me sort of go "so why did I even bother doing all that other bullshit?" but I don't think that means nothing I did had consequences, it just meant the ending was shitty.  :why_so_serious:

Ultimately I'm referring to the way you cannot actually change the story via player actions. You can adjust elements of the story, but the overall plot is always the same.

For example, in ME3, Shepard starts off in the same position and situation no matter WHAT he or she accomplished in the previous games. Even those choices regarding major forces in the galaxy, such as Cerberus and the Council, do not have any real narrative impact.


So, I'm glad they're ditching the bullshit of "previous player choices matter", and instead allowing you to specifically define the narrative stage. It should hopefully allow them to be more aggressive with content separation, too. Ultimately, though, I think nothing much will change. Bioware are fearful of introducing content that cannot be consumed in a single play-through. And whether that's justified or not, I still find it disappointing.

If I had any say I'd advise Bioware to let Dragon Age brand rest a bit and create a new IP for the next big RPG.

They should probably stop coming up with new IPs and go back to licensing them - maybe having someone looking over their collective shoulder going "No, that's stupid. I'm not letting you do that to my gameworld" would curb some of their more egregious excesses.

E: And take away their twitter accounts while they're at it -
(http://i.imgur.com/sRpCJXZ.png)

He pretty much nailed all of those.

As jokes, yeah. As reality? Not so much.

He pretty much fucked up all those in Dragon Age 2.

The deus ex machina one is actually pretty annoying, as that is basically the actual definition (aside from the "I thought it was lame" part).  Yeah, if you don't have any foreshadowing for something and it pretty much feels like something you pulled totally out of nowhere to steer the plot in some direction you wanted, then... yeah, that's kind of a deus ex machina.

Actually, no. Not unless it actually resolves a plotline. An unforseen twist in a plot isn't one.

Fair point, although the complaints I assume he was referring to were, in fact, about resolutions to plotlines.

Hah, funny how opinions can differ. It's not witty (or amusing) and makes him look like someone who is too stupid to realize that going all snarky sarcasm on your customers isn't good.

RPS did a write up on DA3, seems like I can be cautiously positive. Not that I didn't enjoy DA2 despite the derp, but one should expect better from Bioware.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/31/eyes-on-dragon-age-inquisition/

NM

I would've been ok with DA2 never releasing in favor of getting something fully realized a few more years down the line. But I guess DAO was always going to be the last of its kind.

edit: DA2 had a lot going for it. The whole idea of staying in one city was great, and I liked the new graphical style. 

  

No, the idea of DA2 had a lot going for it, the actual implementation was terrible.

I agree with this completely.  For me DA2 was a fun game, it just wasn't up to Bioware's standards.  To me it was one more piece of evidence that something was going really wrong with the gaming company.  Almost no decision made in that game affected the storyline one iota.  The only one that seemed to have any real effect was Merril's final mission.  It was only in that mission that your choice really mattered at all.  That isn't a hallmark of a Bioware game.  The fact that maps were reused ad naseum again didn't bother me as much as the lack of meaningful choice throughout.

For my gaming dollars this is the last chance that Bioware has to restore my faith in the brand.  I really hope that this time it isn't all talk, but I am not holding my breath.


Oh and as to Gaider's comments.  I look at what he said about fanboi and fangirl and I have to scratch my head.  Bioware has had an arrogance about it since Jade Empire.  They seem to dismiss all criticism under the auspices of past success.  I like Gaider's work a lot but it seems to me he needs to take a step back from that and really look at what this company was and what it is now.  Any garden variety idiot can see that the product has been significantly diminished since the Baldur's Gate 2 Bioware offerings.  In fact no other game they have made has even been close in quality.

Some gameplay video. The game looks like Dragon's Dogma, of all things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aK0z8xeAus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbGN7OBngCQ

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/01/dragon-age-inquisition-in-motion/

edit: the audience cheering in the second vid drives me crazy.

I wish they would go back and explore Jade Empire more - I guess I'm one of the few folks who actually liked the game. :oh_i_see:

I really enjoyed the setting in JE but the combat was not my cup of tea at all and I really disliked how useless companions were in fights.

I played 2 mins of the tutorial before I got bored of jade empire. There was nothing immediately interesting in the setting at all for me. Maybe it's less awkward and cliche in the actual game.

I remember liking Jade Empire a lot, but the graphics were ass, to the point of being a distraction (I played using backwards compatibility on the 360).  

I enjoyed Jade Empire as well. I still replay it every few years, actually. The game definitely had flaws, though.

From watching those videos it doesn't look like a party based game in the slightest.

Combat rolls etc.
If they're making a more action-oriented game like Mass Effect, I'm afraid most teammates aren't really going to do much aside from healing etc.
Camera really reminds me of Mass Effect.

It's curious how they really want to do action combat, but the mechanics lessons from the Souls series and Dragon's Dogma are nowhere to be seen. But it's still a long ways off, so never say never. I really want another fantasy world I can lose myself in.

Skyrim did it for me.
With lots of mods. I doubt Bioware can do open world right. And their non-isometric combat haven't really shown any decent melee gameplay since...Jade Empire?

Since the Jennifer Hepler incident I'd call it closer to outright antagonism. I've never seen a company that has such an open level of contempt for its customers. Their condescending attitude during the entire ME3 ending saga was particularly galling.

Not even the recent SimCity fiasco?

On EA's side, they didn't have central staff saying things like, "My least favorite thing is <main reason lots of your customers are buying your product>"

A lot of what he's saying there is in defense of their fans (the 'pander' and 'fanboy' ones those are clearly aimed at the subset of people on their community forums who attack anyone who enjoyed the games, often using those terms), I hardly think that everything there can be described as contempt for their customers. The 'realistic' one is specifically about the shit they catch for including gay characters/relationships.

You mean there are people out there so obsessed with hatred for all things Bioware that they'd sign up for their forums just to endlessly whine and complain about every game they've made since Baldur's Gate 1?

And sometimes even just for having badass women fighters! Like Aveline! Which is just crazy, because Aveline is the best.

Yeah that comes up too, but I have read "but it just isn't realistic for all these characters to be bisexual [therefore you should take options away from gay players]" about 5 billion times.

If you ask me, catering to bisexual romance is making that 'grim dark' brand of Dragon Age world harder to sell.
Not that the blood explosions and 's'plode' kill animations helped. Didn't seem so bad with DA:O, but DA2 takes it a tad too cartoony for my liking.

Late to the party, but I love that solution for a number of reasons. It's great for explorer types who hate when the game gets in the way. It also means making a business out of savefile manipulators, even if "business" is nothing more than eyeballs and awareness.

Best news I took out of the various Bioware panels I sat in on this weekend? - DA3 is still a year away. Listening to them stutter and mumble about the issues the time constraints on DA2 created was quite amusing.

They seemed quite insistent that the game would be playable as a top down, party based, strategy game if you chose to - despite Frostbite being primarily an FPS engine. They spent a whole panel talking about how they were adapting and adding to the engine to suit an RPG's needs.

Some gameplay footage, minor(?) spoilers involved:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8xJMWRI-cA#t=172

Looks good and the open world exploration is very welcome.  But no Day One purchase from me. 

Isn't DA, like, totally, single player, though?

So who gives a fuck if other people who you'll never meet people want to virtually fuck girls, boys or both in their videogames?

I don't really understand the complaint. Without wishing to drive this thread into politics, if the gays are causing civilisation to collapse I would have thought all the buggery in DA would make it more dystopian.

I will add though that the template of 4 predictable romance options does add to the bioware cookie cutter plot feel.

Anyway, as Bunk says, the delays on this are making me dare to hope. Cookie cutter or not, the only bioware game I've found satisfying since KotOR was DAO, and very occaisionally SWtOR.

Yeah. The fact that it isn't being rushed out the door like DA2 was is very encouraging.

I think they realize that they fucked up two of their brands (DA, ME) with their last games so hope to turn it around.

I am pretty sure Mass Effect isn't considered fucked up at all.

Hahaha, ok.

It isn't. It was, but hasn't been since. DA2 did not get a similar treatment, launched weaker, is up against a much bigger similarly-positioned RPG, and had more fundamental issues throughout the whole game than which could be solved by editing a video sequence.

Gameplay video looks good though. Pretty bright. Like Skyrim with a color paletter  :awesome_for_real:

They are really not comparable. Some people love to hate Mass Effect 3 and they are free to think they are the majority but they are not. Despite the uproar for the original 3ending and the loud disappointment of lots of people, the game got amazing reviews, several awards and accolades, scooped up an insane amount of money and still has about 89 average score on Metacritic. Dragon Age 2, well, didn't get any of that stuff. Not even close.

All of which I agree with.

Which makes me think your earlier post was not sarcastic :-)

ME3 was great right up until the end, wherein it got...less great.

So like if 95% of the game is great and the ending pisses off tons of people, you still have like 95% of a great game worth playing.

Whereas DA2...I never finished. After playing the shit out of DAO and Awakenings and all the DLCs. Multiple full play throughs. I didn't like the changed combat, didn't really like the maps, the story didn't seem all that great....it just wasn't nearly as good. It was weak all over, basically. Not horrible, I mean it was playable. If  it had been a stand alone game rather than a sequel, it probably would have done better.

ME2 was basically a hands down improvement of virtually every aspect of ME without losing any of the great parts of ME. DA2 was the exact opposite. Everything just got a little shittier, and the gameplay changes made the game less fun. (At least to me).

I think it's laughable that anybody can say ME3 wasn't fucked up. It was. Totally. You can still fuck up a good game with a bad ending, like cutting a huge fart as you leave the room. They had to fix it to somewhat appease the fans, and the two co-founders of BioWare just happened to exit stage left after the outpouring of denial and vitriol.

Whether or not it damaged the brand forever? I guess we'll see.

DA2 was just copy-pasta garbage. That said, anybody who trusts EA now with their release day money is a fool in my mind.

What about ME3 besides the ending sucked? I loved it. I loved the stories, the multiplayer and eventually all the DLC (especially Citadel). I got sucked into multiplayer before I finished it originally, and by the time I 100%'d, they announced a "fix" to this "broken" endgame I heard about so i waited. I never experienced what everyone complained about.

But aside from how it all ended, I thought it was great.

And even how it ended, nothing ever "ends". If there's a business rationale to continuing something, they'll make it happen. Movies (look, suddenly more SW movies), books (there will be more Harry Potter eventually, I am quite sure), TV (how many more series are getting rez'd anew on Netflix?), games (rebuilds on iPad, new as online/f2p). So I never thought ME3 was "the end forever and ever and the ending better be epic". I'm too old to believe that hypeshit, so didn't have that expectation, especially since one of their endings included shaky-helmet glimpse.

We've danced around this maypole before, but I'm of the opinion that when you sell an entire game series around your story-telling and then shit on the ending, you fucked up.

We also can't really ignore that there was a gigantic backlash to the game on that basis, so much so it had to be resolved after weeks of posturing and PR BS explaining that it wasn't fucked up. That happened.

Issues I personally had with the whole of the ME series:

The writing felt like every encounter was written by a different author who hadn't even met the previous authors, let alone considered the tone and direction if the story so far. By half way through the second one everybody seemed to be trying to out-epic the last guy.

The gameplay and UI consistently felt like a console shooter from two generations back.

The Mass Effect series has lost me far, far more powerfully than the Dragon Age series.  After the ending, I had no interest in replaying the games, when even while I was playing through ME3 I was imagining my next replay.  I thought perhaps I'd come back for some of the DLC.  They released the 'fixed' ending.  Even now I have yet to drum up enough interest or care to watch it.  They released two DLC.  I looked at some of the previews and screenshots, thought I'd buy them when they came out.  But...I didn't drum up enough interest to actually get them.  Right now, pretty much anything that says 'Mass Effect' fails to get me interested enough to give a damn.

Dragon Age, on the other hand, had some missteps with DA2, but I still enjoyed that game a lot.  The story was good - it had no more derp moments than most RPGs, and the fact that it wasn't the oh-so-common 'hero saves world/city/universe/designated victim' story really helped it along in my eyes.  The copy/paste crap was annoying, the gameplay did take a step backwards from Dragon Age...  But the voiced protagonist was done incredibly well - better, even, than Mass Effect did it, because I felt that the choice system better reflected differing personalities.  So it had definite pluses and minuses, but based purely on DA2, I would buy the next game from that series.  It certainly did not sour me on the series at all.

Yeah, ME3's ending sequence pretty much killed the franchise for me and my friends who had played it.  I've never been able to work up the drive to try the 'fixed' ending, let alone the DLC.  I really have no interest in seeing what, if anything, they do with it down the road. 

I liked DA2 quite a bit, and never really agreed with most of the common complaints I heard.  But between ME3 and some Bioware account issues I had that they were never really able to get fixed, I'll probably hold off on DA3 until awhile after release.  I just don't have faith in the company's ability to deliver anymore. 

ME3 had the co-op bit that made it worth playing after finishing it. I clocked a hell lot longer hours in there than single player.
DA2, the moment I'm done, I reloaded - pick option B before finale and fought the same battles saw the same stupid chain of events that made zero sense.
How can anyone tolerate this is beyond me,
I didn't even bother going to the ending slides before uninstalling.
DLC - lol. They only did one before realizing nobody gave a a shit about DA2 anymore.
Stores cancelled the Collector Edition re-stock.
DA3? Yeah, I'm not too desperate for that. I'll wait for sale.

I disagree. The combat was entirely almost better, imo. If it had tactical view, it would've been just about exactly what I wanted. I also vastly preferred the way you built your character in DA2. I loved the fuck out of DA:O, as everyone knows, and have many, many, many more hours sunk into that game over DA2, but I really do not understand how on earth people prefer DA:O's slow-ass underwater-feeling combat.

It's a toss up for me story-wise between the two, as I usually don't care too much about the plot so long as it doesn't get in the way of the thing Bioware is better at, characters. ME3's ending, for example, got WAY IN THE WAY of their strength. DAO got out of the way better, but I kinda liked that DA2's story of How Hawke Fails at Basically Everything was pretty different from anything else I've done. I don't need too many game plots to tell me that story, but I don't mind it once in a long while. :P

The copypasting of maps and stupid waves of enemies jumping down from nowhere? Totally awful. And totally not in either DLC (there were two, rk47, not counting anything dumb like the equipment packs). They know that was a huge fuck up.

I agree with that too. I never understood the hate for DA2's combat, especially when compared with DA:O.

Believe me, I hated it. But it's too long ago and I hardly remember. The really overblown casting animations (actually, all fighting animations) were the very first thing that stuck out. But it wasn't just a visual issue.

DA2 actually had 2 DLCs, not 1, and they were both well done IMO.

I think the most fun class to play was a rogue, and DA2 rogue was better imo than DA:O.

Yah, I played a rogue in both and the experience in DA2 was a lot better.  I actually enjoyed the combat a lot. 

Plus, Merrill.   :Love_Letters:

Rogue had the goofiest animations (the DW one in particular), but was probably my favorite too. Mage was way more fun for me to play in DA2 too, really. I actually finished some mage playthroughs, which I cannot say for DA:O.

LOOK WE'RE SORRY ABOUT THE MAP REUSE IN DA2 CAN YOU PLEASE TRUST US (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzuR1Fn_b48#t=141)

I figure I'll do the same as I did with MA3 after being so very disappointed with DA2.   Let you all buy it and act as my beta testers so I can find out if they really learned their lessons.

Then I'll have to decide if I want to fuck around with Origin.

$10 humble bundle in 2015

That felt really generic.

I couldn't really tell.  They just showed a bunch of scenery.  It might be better than an MMO without a proper AH.

That looks good, but I'm done buying into the Bioware hype.  Those nice, big unique areas are probably empty.

It looked like Assassin's Creed to me for the most part with the exception of a few scenes. I'm still worried about the Origin thing.

Everywhere seemed to be very wet

I'm not dealing with this Origin shit. That needs to stop.

Seemed like a low poly count Skyrim reel... or a high poly count GW2 one.

Which means exactly nil to the game.

It did make me re-watch the DA2 trailer though, which set aside like, the whole game and stuff, the trailer was fun.

Which is always the problem with Blur Studios trailers and their ilk*. They always always always show the game in a much better light than the game actually is.

* I'm not sure Blur did DA2.

Hrm, I was thinking it looked sharper/prettier than Skyrim, but I don't have Skyrim loaded down with a billion appearance mods so I don't know which version of Skyrim you have in your mind's eye. Certainly it was more colorful.

Other than camera position stuff, this was supposedly the way the actual game will look on top-end systems, also so comparisons to the sorts of cinematic trailers that Blur does don't seem especially relevant to me. Obviously there's going to be some level of trickery going on in any trailer, but this wasn't in the same category as stuff like, say, the WAR trailers where it bears no connection at all to the game.

Are we talking about EA's evil retail download platform? Or their policy of predetermined character origin?

If the former, what is the origin thing? Is it just that we can't buy it on steam? In which case can we not just buy it on a disk and party like its 1999?

If the latter, meh, price worth paying for protagonist voice over. I'm bored of Gordon Freeman style dialog.

I am pretty sure on PC it is going to be Origin-only much like ME3. Can you even buy a ME3 DVD and avoid launching through Origin? I was under the impression you couldn't. I don't really consider this an issue, though, so I never looked into it. Origin doesn't really cause any problems on my computer, and it doesn't really get in the way - but it's a religious issue for some people.

No you can't.

Origin is a fuck you EA issue. They put out a lot of bad games and make you use their shitty drm for the privilege

Oh yes, its been a while since I looked at anything in EA hell, but its all coming back now.

Sorry, I combined a few different rants. The Blur comment was regarding DA2, not DA3. DA2 was a fine enough looking game. I commented on the Blur trailer though because I feel like Blur is the go-to company for large marketing budgets that often result in a fantastic trailer at odds with the quality of the game, or with what the game is really about or how it plays. I've felt this way since EQ2.

Cinematics are fine and all, Blur or not. But at least try and convey some of how the game works. Or better yet, if you've got a fine enough engine to talk about "high end" anything, use the engine itself.

AC4 does a fine job with its trailer. It's higher res than ingame for sure, but not by a huge margin. More importantly though it matches well the feel of the game itself. SWTOR trailers meanwhile, not so much.

Having said all that, DA3 looks ok to me. It doesn't have the gruff splendor of Skyrim, but then they're not promising that. Not really sure what they're promising.  And I do assume they'll end up doing the large marketing budget thing anyway. Will begin to care as it gets closer.

Release date is Oct 7 2014. Also, trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO2h4qUNJ60&feature=youtu.be

EDIT:

Official website got some updates as well.

Map thing: http://www.dragonage.com/#!/en_US/explore

Bunch of other random info trickling out about classes, etc., as well.

I'm ready!  :why_so_serious:

All I need to know is, "Origin required?"

The answer is directly inverse to "Will I buy it?"

Pretty sure that's a yes. (Or there's console versions I suppose.)

What Bergman said.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/cat-breathing.gif)

Origin.. doesn't matter.  It didn't really get in the way of ME3 at all.

In what alternate universe was that latest video 'gameplay'?

Biowareland!

I'm pretty sure I'll end up buying this anyway, but I'm definitely going to wait a few weeks to see what other folks' reactions are.  I fully expect their declaration that "we've changed, honest!" to amount to basically nothing in the face of being an EA property.

It's still EA, no matter how much polish they put on the ad campaign. And it's still Origin, which serves no purpose.

Yep.  I'll let others take the plunge, see if it is more of the same from DA2 and then decide.  I did the same with MA3 and was happier for it.

I'll be your huckleberry.

I think the tone of that trailer was off. Edit the parts that show horses and swords and it might have been a Mass Effect 4 teaser. It didn't feel like playing in a medieval world at all.

And also, too: You are 'The One', special, saving the world from an unknown but all powerful threat only you can master. It's like they have one story and just roll a dice to fill in the names. "The Breach", please...

They can't win - when the story of DA2 *wasn't* about some awesome character saving the world, people complained about that too.

Yeah, but different people. And fuck those guys.

The trailer made me think 'this the plot from ES:Oblivion'. Which was off putting as I didn't like Oblivion.

If that was the only issue, it wouldn't have been a huge problem. The game had many other problems.

I liked the idea of the story behind two well enough, but it was a tough sell as a sequel to a very different sort of story.  It's jarring going from a nation-spanning epic to following what's supposed to be a very personal journey set within a single city.

I liked being a Grey Warden.

Dragon Age Origins was really good IMO but it suffered from the same problem as Mass Effect in that literally everything you did that wasn't about the main conflict was more interesting than the main conflict.

Like the one time I was engaged by the SpaceCthulu shit was when you talked to Sovereign. The rest of the stuff I loved were basically smaller arcs and character arcs.

Same with Dragon Age; The individual areas and their story arcs were cool but the notorcs from notmordor were the least interesting/engaging thing in the game.

This is my main problem with most BioWare games - their universes and setting and backstory tend to be more interesting than anything the main plot could throw at me.

That all being said - I haven't heard a peep about the rumored multiplayer for DA:I. If it's anything like Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, which I played considerably more than the main game, I will be overjoyed.

That's a good point.  Probably my favorite story aspect in Dragon Age II were the Enigma of Kirkwall journal entries.  It hinted at some pretty interesting things that the game never actually explores.

IIRC if you do some dot connecting there are tie-ins to that stuff in a few of the side quests. I know the one with the evil tomes in Act 2 is related. Also that stuff is there partly to explain why Kirkwall seems to be such a hellmouth of blood magic and demons and such.

It's that time again!

 :grin:

mod edit: fuck that's huge.

I recently thought about buying DA2, thinking I could get it cheap and something to play with my brain shut off.  However, as a 3-year old game it still would cost roughly $70 to buy the game and the dlc.  After three years that seems a bit silly.

That's the worst thing about EA's games. They never go on sale at decent prices while anyone is still interested in playing them. Even the latest SimCity is still selling at full price.

That time when the mods have to tell you to stop posting in Bioware related threads?

(http://replygif.net/i/163.gif)


I didn't play any of the DLC.  Not sure if it's even any good. Base game would be worth the $20 they're asking for it.  I think the game is around 35 hours, if I'm remember correctly.

If you liked DA2, the DLCs are definitely worth it. They addressed the copypaste and derpy wave mechanic complaints (basically there are no reused maps at all in either DLC, IF there are waves they're disguised like in DA:O instead of hopping down from nowhere, etc), the story/world building is interesting (imo), and there's a lot of blibberblabber between companions. Legacy in particular is great, because you get MOAR FAMILY. And the fact the whole thing is just another Varric story, you can do them in any of the three acts (and the DLCs will know what act you're doing it in, and change accordingly, which is nice for replayability).

Basically, if DA2 was as good as its DLCs, I don't think people would hate on it as much.


edit: That said, DA2 is still full price on Origin? That's really dumb.

EDIT TWO, ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Oh, no it's 20 bucks. Eh, whatever. The only DLCs worth buying are the two "real" ones, the stupid weapon packs and shit are totally skippable.

The DLC is IMO pretty good, and largely free of several of the things people complained about in the base game (enemies spawning right on top of you, area re-use). I think I like Legacy a little better than the Felicia Day one, mostly because she's really only an OK voice actress. She's not like, ME3 reporter chick bad or anything, but neither is she any great shakes, and she has a lot of screen time. There are some outrageous French accents to make up for it somewhat though.

For as much as I shit-talk it, I still played DA2 a lot and agree that the DLC is a considerable improvement.  I think I got them all as a bundle at some point, and the weapon packs are actually pretty nice, although they make loot basically useless thereafter.

I enjoyed both DA:O and DA2 but they're completely different games that as far as I'm concerned might as well be set in different worlds too, crossover cameos notwithstanding.

DA3 looks ok, not awe-inspiring, but I'm kinda innured to that anyway. And I'll be curious about the story, but am not so invested in the universe that the story is what's dragging me in. It comes down to how it plays.

And considering an Oct release could very well become a delay into Q1 '15, for any number of reasons, that puts it up against the graphics, story and game play that I really am looking forward to in Witcher 3 (I think Feb 15?).

The thing is, you can always count on the first iteration of a Witcher game being really broken in some way.  And with the added ambition in 3, it may be even more so.   Of course, that won't stop me from being dumb and buying it day one.  A much savvier human being might wait until the inevitable massive steam sale.  

Did they de-shitify Witcher 2 enough that I should try it again?

Can you hold your nose long enough to get through Chapter 1?  It's pretty long, but once you get past it, the game becomes worth the time you're playing it.  And to be fair, Chapter 1 is mostly OK outside of 2 completely stupid fights. And a lot of running.  But that never changes, that game loves to run your ass all over the place.

I can try I guess. My interest petered out back when it came out when I was in the basement of some burned out... insane asylum? Orphanage? With ghosts I could barely hurt that I had to dodge perfectly or reload over and over and over. Or something, my memory of it has pretty much faded at this point.

Witcher 2 opened up in a castle under siege didn't it?

They did make the early experience easier, but that was after I had slogged through it. I played a few hours, walked away in frustration, tried again a month later and then couldn't put it down for another 75 hours or so. But that was before they vamped the early part.

For me, Witcher 2 fell apart shortly after the start of chapter 2 (where you start doing stuff in the war camp). The combat was just plain unfun, and the writing made me wince -- instead of the "consistently mediocre" vibe I got from Witcher 1, it was all "trying-too-hard-and-failing", which actually bothered me much more.

The orphanage is a quest area in the first chapter that totally fucks you up if you go in there too soon.  Need to level up a few times before trying that one.

I dunno, I got bored in the forest dealing with the troll at the bridge and a bunch of other stuff. The combat just annoys me too much. I like the setting, the feel of it, but the gameplay really puts me off.

Origin is so much fucking shit!

I had to change a computer and I had Dragon Age 2 on it, through Origin. Since Origin stores your saved games in the cloud, I didn't worry about keeping the save files since they were in the cloud right? WRONG! Once I reinstalled the game on a new computer I couldn't get the save files back. There's just no option to get them and it doesn't do to anything automatically. Maybe I am missing something, but I wonder what's the point of cloud saves if they are gone if your hard disk breaks. Fucking EA.

Dragon Age 2 came out a while ago. Are you sure Origin even did cloud saves back then?

I don't/can't use the cloud saves because they don't give enough space for my needs. It's only like 100 MB or so.

That's pretty half assed. Either they have cloud saving or they don't. It shouldn't be possible for the save to fail because they're pinching pennies on dirt cheap disk space.

I held out hope that it would be like a few other EA games, requiring Origin account registration, but not requiring install of the sticky-fingered client. Sadly, not so. (http://forum.bioware.com/topic/503072-this-title-requires-ea-origin-and-a-permanent-internet-connection-to-play/page-13#entry16512751)

EA's Cloud Save: We have toilet but no paper.  :why_so_serious:

Been working fine for me.

On the one Origin game I play per year  :oh_i_see:

Release date pushed back a few weeks to November:

http://www.dragonage.com/#!/en_US/news/dragon-age-inquisition-update

I won't lie, I'm anticipating this game.  But I'm going in warily this time and reading reviews before I buy.

Ditto. I'm hoping they learned their lesson, but I'm not buying at release and probably not until after the holidays now with the push-back.

If anything would make me put up with Origin, it would be this game. But it would have to be like Skyrim levels of awesome.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/sochi/sochi-bear-crying.gif)

That bear seriously freaks me out.

I think it's adorably creepy. 

Can anyone summarize the differences between DA3 and the previous 2 games for me? I honestly know nothing about this one.

I don't really know anything about it either, Morfiend.  Just the bits and bobs I've read here, I think. 

I'm purposely keeping myself in the dark for this one.  Might not be the best idea, but I'd rather just go into it knowing basically nothing outside of what I know from the previous games.   I'm going to buy it.  95% chance I'll love it.  So, why not?

The main big change is that there are a bunch of open world elements that weren't present in prior games. Giant zones that change depending on stuff you do in them etc.

I don't know what you mean by "differences."

Stuff that's the same: The setting, you get followers, you level up, you kill things and take their stuff, chatting (or making out with) with your peeps and solving other people's problems are both still a focus, combat has tactical view again and you can still pause to issue orders, etc. Oh, and you're saving the world again.

SPOILERS FOR RASIX

tbh I think most people are still projecting. My guess is it is a Bioware style game, and everyone who likes them will like it and everyone else will point out that EA sucks. But from what the internet says...

There ... wasn't a twist after the third planet in DAO.

Anyway, chart must be old, they announced non-human races for DAI ages ago.  :why_so_serious:

Doesn't that guy get revealed as the king after the third planet?

It's not like you turn out to be Revan I grant you.

Are you voiced now (yes I'm being lazy)?

He gets revealed as a bastard when you wander into Redcliffe if he's in your party (so as early as the first planet) or after you wake up the Arl (so ... as early as planet 1.5). So early enough it doesn't even feel like a twist, just Alistair being like, "Oh by the way, we're still getting to know each other, here's a thing."

And Trippy, they added voiced protagonist in DA2. So yes. Although I guess the NEW thing about that is you have two choices for each gender. One of the lady voices is Traynor from ME3.

Not even Claudia Black voice acting can get me to buy another EA game.   :heartbreak: 

Well *I* went to Redcliffe third!

I think I went there second, but I can't really remember. I just remember it not feeling like much of a twist.

There was one playthrough I left Redcliffe for last, didn't have him in my party, etc, so I basically "found out" when we were about to leave for the Landsmeet. I finally felt justified taking all the WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME EARLIER YOU ASSHOLE dialogue options.  Turns out he'll dump you if you're a giant bitch about it.  :why_so_serious:

There's apparently no Day 0 DLC for this one, if I remember right what BioWare person posted on their forums when this subject popped up. Either they've learned their lesson, or the schedule was too tight to cut some bits into "separate but not really" package.

Claudia's apparently not a follower in 3 though :oh_i_see:

My Steam copy takes issue with DA2 being "Origin Only"  They didn't start that until after DA2 was released.

True, my copy of DA2 was through Steam as well.

I liked Hawke MUCH more than DA1's mute hero.  Also, if they wanted to make Kirkwall a claustrophobic slave city that's fine, but the copypasta wasn't.  The open areas sound really good, but I'm still highly suspicious there's much in them.

Roll for random monster.

My copy is thru Steam also.

For me its not so much that Claudia Black isn't a follower but that Morrigan isn't :P

If true, my guess it is because EA no longer need it to screw you out of right of first sale, since Origin does that anyway. But I'm still a bit surprised they aren't doing it simply to get players used to DLC.

Pretty sure we're used to DLC having replaced real expansion packs at this point already.

That said, my recollection is not that there's no day 0 DLC, but that there's not going to be any DLC that has a companion in it like Shale or Sebastian. But I haven't really paid much attention, as day 0 DLC does not angry me up like it does other people.

Yeah, I meant that sort of sizable DLC thing, that has part of the cast and/or story from the main game. There's still stuff like the horse armour and the funny looking weapons and such, but these are so minor they don't really register for me at this point.

New video about combat? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYZw98f58Xo) Maybe I'm in a bad mood but I'm so unimpressed.

Animations still look they are made by a bunch of students.

It looks like DAO and DA2's combat had a baby, and that is pretty much exactly what I wanted, so I am pleased (it also looks like people finally learned how to attack and move AT THE SAME TIME, the sky is the limit now). The animations are a little derp, but that doesn't surprise me at all and I will be able to tune them out within a half hour, I'm sure.

It looks good to me.  Combat and the skills weren't my issue with DA2.  Really like obsessing over skill trees and attack order.  Probably my favorite part of DA2.

Camera doesn't zoom out far enough.

It's very… I guess "XTREME" is the most suitable adjective. Like it was made by 10 year olds in the late 90's.

I think the word they go with is "AWESOME" :grin:  And yeah, this exaggeration to the point where it becomes silly hurts them rather than helps, imo, and the quality --while higher than Bethesda offerings-- could've been better.

But whatever, I was too amused/distracted by Sera's portrait being literal trollface in a wig to pay much attention to what was going on screen.

The consolized commands in the bottom right are really distracting, too.  Is that what the previous games were like on consoles?

BUT GUISE WE NEED TO FOCUS ON THE STORY! BIOWARE DOES BEST STORY GODDAMIT!
*chugs on dorito* I can't believe you guys turned into graphics whore overnight!
BETRAYALLLL!

My concern was more along the lines of what it meant for the gameplay.

Yeah the console version of both prior games had that thing in the corner, replacing the long taskbar at the bottom of the screen on the PC version.

You're right. Even the still frame for the youtube snap made me crack.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/daily/65/grr.jpg) Grrrrrr....I'm a shield. Grrrrr!

That same shield is in DA2.

It annoys me that such things even bother me, but I still can't get used to the mage 'do 360 degree spins and wave staff around like it is a dual-lightsaber in the Star Wars prequels' caster animations.

Similar thing with the UI: I can't list an objective reason why the consoleized look is bad, but it's justnot appealing.

Sorry, master race.
You're just not our top selling platform.

The PC interface is likely going to be the same as it always was. DA1/2 had different UIs on the console from the PC, this will probably be no different.

I vastly prefer that to the utterly embarrassing sputsputsputsputsput of DA:O. Yeah I'd rather something a little less goofy, but apparently I prefer goofy over ... whatever the DA:O animation was.

The animations I save my "jesus christ really?!" for are the dual daggers. So dumb. So dumb!

Video looked bad, but more because they had picked awful camera and control settings to " show off" the engine than because it necessarily means anything for the game.

I assume the camera can be zoomed right out and everyone controlled with a mouse, pause button, and enormous hotbars. Just as God intended.

And in Vindictus, apparently (http://vindictusdb.com/item?i=Lion+Shield). Which amuses me, given all the pooh-poohing the Good Doctors did about these inferior Eastern RPGs, not long before DA2 happened.

Well, let's not pretend putting a lion on a shield is some kind of super original thing.

sput


sput


sput


sput

Seriously, I have a billion hours in DA:O and not one finished playthrough is a mage, and I am pretty sure it was entirely because of their bullshit animations.

sput
sput
sput
sput

SAD

My only finished playthrough is a mage, and I have no regrets, because mages were insanely overpowered. Especially with that magical warrior background. You puke out a whole wad of spells, then throw on something like nine sustained effects, and mainline lyrium till the fight's over

I'm reading this, but I don't understand it at all. My DA:O mages were always busy round the clock throwing down crazy aoes, cc and setting/following on the effect chains; they never had any time to do any of that sput thing. :drill:

plays mage, wants to twirl staff.

I banished mages from my party sometime around playthrough #3. My PC mages never got to be high enough level where I always had a spell to cast (or felt it was worth casting, more specifically) and/or I tried arcane warrior and God, that was boring too.

I don't care if they were supposedly overpowered, they were boring as fuck with shitty animations and fuck DA:O mages.

exception: casting fireball with friendly fire on, something about exploding EVERYONE on the screen made me laugh, even though it was not, perhaps, the best course of action

Reminds me of an unidentified potion I drunk in baldurs gate, turns out it was a potion of firey breath, everyone died. Good times!

My first attempt to play Baldur's Gate, I found a wand of lightning bolt. I had no idea it bounced. That was the end of that party.

The only thing I remember about DA:O mages is that I resented having to micromanage them when I really just wanted to stab people in the face.

Unrelated, but what of the DA2 DLC is worth playing?  I'm through Act 1 on a new play through and have yet to die from area-reuse.

Anders is a giant wanker from the start.  I can't decide who's a bigger waste of flesh, him or Carver.  I've had Varric in my party more and he's just fucking hilarious.  I've yet to play any amount of time with Fenris in my group.  Does he say anything interesting?

Re: DLC, they're both good and don't suffer from the two main complaints people had about the base game (the way enemies spawned in and reused areas.) They can be played in any act, you can take your sibling with you, and the conversations differ depending on which act you do them in so there's a fair amount of replayability.

If you want Anders to get yelled at a lot, bring him and Fenris places together.

Is the DLC character worth getting?

Yes.  He should have been included in the main game.

Fenris is great, and extremely useful in combat as well.

I forgot that Sebastian even counted as DLC.

Back on topic, some details about the co-op multiplayer side mode:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/26/dragon-age-inquisitions-co-op-multiplayer-is-all-about-loot?watch=

Sounds like much like the multiplayer in ME3, it's a separate thing, but a more Diablo-like style this time rather than horde mode with waves.

FAQ: http://www.dragonage.com/#!/en_US/news/multiplayer-faq

I love Carver, you take that back. He is the most actual-sibling-feeling of any video game sibling I have experienced! My Hawke's relationship with Carver is pretty close to my relationship with one of my sisters during our teens (the MIDDLE girl, who had (has) a massive chip on her shoulder about it), complete with "but deep down we fucking love each other, dammit."

Anyway, DA2's content DLCs are all good. If I was going to pick just one, even including Sebastian's, I'd pick Legacy. But that's partly because it has a bigger emphasis on your family. If you hate Carver, it might not be quite so fun. Mark of the Assassin is my least favorite (because it takes up one of my precious party slots with What's Her Face's mary sue character), but it's still quite good. I'm pretty sure if DA2 was as good as its DLCs, it would've been received much better.

ON Topic: I don't really get why the multiplayer exists for DA:I, but if it's as fun as ME3's, I'll wind up being glad it exists.

They probably made a shitton of money off of people in ME 3 that were too impatient to earn their points to get their boxes full of weapon and class upgrades.

Speaker isn't the most engaging, but the Keep looks pretty nifty:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rNDZ0Ih3v0


tl, dw: You can pick all sorts of shit to recreate your saves (although it'll look for those as a base if you still have them), and Varric will tell you all about yourself.  :heart:

Man, I barely remember what happened in DA1.  I suppose that can be my next replay.  Game is hella long.

Enjoying my DA2 replay, but I'm still being cheap and haven't gotten any of the DLC.   :awesome_for_real:

Well, Varric will help you out if you never get around to playing DA:O again!  :why_so_serious: Seriously I am way too pleased about that stupid feature.

It was supposed to be in ME3 too, but never made release.

It actually does exist. It's called Mass Effect Genesis 2. It isn't free, though (except for the Wii U people since they didn't have the previous games) and I think the number of choices you can specify is way less.

Dragon Age: Origins is free on Origin right now.

The price is the installation of Origin.

NEVER.

If you put that in your sig it would save you the trouble of posting the same thing every time Origin is mentioned.

Origin, not even once.

Origin is mentioned constantly and I don't respond. In this case you said DA:O was free. Which is not the case.

Quit being such a baby.  

Lost my DA:O disks, so this helps.  Yay.  Stupid Social Page even had my DLC. (I don't think I'll have time to play this now)

I've had Origin on my computer for quite a while now. Oddly my life doesn't seem to have been negatively impacted by it in any way:

I'm stuck with it for BF4 and Titanfall. May as well save myself the trouble of re-installing Dragon Age by hand. One of the very last PC games I ever bought in box form.

Feh who gives a shit about the thin client crap? Just don't launch it unless you're playing the game and then quit out of it when you're done. I barely keep Steam running, much less that bullshit Origin or uPlay crap. They barely factor for more than a month every eighteen.

I just go to the website and add it to my account.  That way it's in my name, but as long as I don't get the itch to play, I don't have to worry about to Origin or not to Origin.

Ok, so they have decided to remove healing spells for the game. I'm all for experimenting with gameplay systems, but shouldn't the game's tone be established by the third game? Sounds like another case of not knowing what they want, just like DA2. Hopefully without the terrible repetition though.



http://forum.bioware.com/topic/515339-health-and-healing-a-view-from-the-outside/

So basically what he is saying is I can skip this until the modding community adds a healing line of spells. 

Frostbite is apparently really not friendly when it comes to mods so you can likely pretty much forget about such option.

I'm not sure why it'd mean you have to skip the game, though. He makes it pretty clear that he had no problems with going through the content even though he's pretty shit at the game, and it wasn't even on the easiest difficulty.

Instant heals are pretty much a terrible mechanic to begin with.

I think healing is one of the more silly and unnecessary standards of RPGs, so I'm happy to say goodbye to it.

Nobody's bothered by the retconning of the lore, with all the spirit healers and shit? It's not like the gameplay alone can keep the game afloat, you kinda need the lorelol.  

edit: also someone somewhere pointed out that since the game has multiplayer like ME3, it can't have healing as a major element because grouping would become an issue. So we get big single player gameplay changes so EA can sell treasure chest microtransactions to skinner machine addicts. Although I'm sure you fuckers will love it.

Because instead of heals I have to juggle wards, including a ward you have to cast before every fight. It's just heals in a different form and not in a way that sounds fun to me.

It's true, wards and such are a prefight ritual which I for one do find bothersome and try to play so that I don't need to do it except before bosses. Would suck if I had to do them every time or run out of potions before a boss. Not good design, far worse than reactive healing.

Am I bothered by reconning of Dragon Age lore? Is this a trick question?

No.

Not really. I've always found healing to be a bit shit in regards to story in RPG's because it's one of those things writers have to handwave away whenever they need a character to be mortally wounded. Healing is in large part a throwback to D&D where death is potentially a lot more permanent and needs to be avoided a lot more than a game where you can just reload your last quick save if things go wrong. Not really sad to see it go so long as combat is properly balanced.

Makes way more sense though. Planning for a fight ahead of time is actually tactical in my mind. Spamming heals isn't.

To me it's not really tactical planning when you just cast the same spell before every fight. It's just an extra step before every fight. Having to juggle different moves to keep my wards up doesn't sound fun to me either but I know that's just personal preference. Snarky comment aside I'll probably get it anyway despite not being the healing mechanics I prefer.

This sounds like a vast improvement to me, much like the ME3 barrier/shield system.

Check out all the fucks I give:

Damn you, I must have clicked that three times.  :oh_i_see:

Given how different DA2 was from DA:O, that Divinity is a better DA:O, and that Skyrim is a better DA2, I literally have no preconceived notion of what to expect from DA3. I don't care if I do/don't see any of the characters from the prior two. There's no game mechanic I'm wedded to. I'll check it out if people it's worth it, but otherwise this isn't on my list.

So is DA:O actually worth the time to download the 25 gigs for free? Is there an actual game under there, or is it just waifu simulator 101?

I don't know, I thought it was a good game. 

Perfectly playable. Nothing special, but fun enough.

I don't know if there's any retconning needed here really -- the spirit healers were supposed to be a rare thing to begin with, to the point where Wynne being one getting extra mileage out of her spirit was actually part of her backstory/companion arc. Uh, spoiler I guess. Anyway, I guess it's not implausible if none of the mage companions you get in DAI happens to be one.

Worst case they could always say spirits aren't taking the healers' calls anymore because of that torn veil raining demons business or smth and call it a day.

There's a large and relatively old school RPG in there, with pretty stock plot but it's probably the biggest you'll see from them as I doubt EA will ever let BW spend this many years on crafting just one game. The romance stuff is at best small and completely optional sideshow that the codex neckbeards like to obsess over in desperate attempts to show how far above it all they are.

I enjoyed DA:O enough to play it twice through upon purchase, and it's a fairly long game. I wouldn't say it's any sort of perfect masterpiece, but it was a sight for sore eyes when it was released.  It's a Bioware game, with all of the pros and cons that come with it.  

As for DA2, it was pretty easy to run a healing-light group, where at best you had one heal per fight outside of potions. I'm guessing the lack of active healing won't amount to much here.  

Hopefully the MP saves the SP boredom like it did for me in ME3

Could be, but I'm not trusting Bioware to handle it properly. My guess is that they'll not acknowledge it in any way, as the combat system will be in service of the multiplayer and single player will just get what's there. Like ME3.

edit: I mean listen to this crap


Soda fountains before bosses because there's no healers.


  

They shd've just circumvent it with vampiric weapons etc.
Makes no goddamn sense. Give the guys heal over time instead of insta-heal and the difficulty spike is nicely covered.

Well I think a lot of us here like ME3's multiplayer, and I'd be surprised if anybody here actually spent money on it since you got stuff at a decent rate just by playing. So yeah, if it's as good as ME3's multiplayer, I'll love it and not give a shit about Spirit Healer lore. Actually when it comes to lore, I didn't remember much in the way of detail about the first two games until I logged into :nda:.

Heals, meh.  Seems odd taking them out now but I'm not overly concerned as I rarely used them anyway.  Heals and potions are both anathema to me in non-action RPGs and neither make any sense when looking at it from a Drama standpoint.  (Replace, "cast a heal spell, fucker." with "Drink a potion, fucker.") 

The whole healing system we've had in RPGs is because of bad mechanics and lazy developers that became standards. Mana and chain heals are, and always have been, bullshit.  When it was a few spells that took up limited slots in D&D it made a bit of sense.  You could only cast it so many times per 'day' meaning you were careful and used it only in dire need. When it became "You're a heal bitch, all your mana (horrible system) must go towards keeping <damage dealer> alive, despite being able to deal an equal amount of damage shit was sideways. 

I'm glad to see it go.

I agree, I prefer inherent heal over time mechanics to instant heals. It also provides a better gating mechanic to the content, making players who aren't strong tactical players seek out other missions to boost their levels before trying bosses.

The healing mechanic is going to be potions and to have enough of them, you have to cast barriers and shields at every cooldown (on harder difficulties obv). I don't see how that is any better than healers. It's not necessarily worse either, but it does cheapen the setting for those who care about it. Personally, if I didn't like the lore, I wouldn't even consider playing anything past DAO. Especially not the terrible multiplayer that has no redeeming qualities.





  

It is, theoretically, more punishing if you make mistake who to shield and when, and what enemies you cc out etc, as you don't have unlimited ability to just heal back to full, after each fight -- you're capped by the amount of pots you have with you, which unlike the mana don't regenerate.

I say "theoretically" though, because these restocking checkpoints pretty much bring it back to the 'unlimited heals' state that was supposed to be the problem they're addressing in the first place :uhrr:

Saying quantities of potions are going to be a problem/ hinderance is probably going to turn out just like "watch your gold" is a problem in RPGs..  It never is after the first 1/4 of the game. You're killing enough people that you're rolling in funds.

Even Skyrim, where the vendors only have a max. amount of gold/ week (day?) you still wound up with far more of it than you'd ever need.  Consumable management is a joke in RPGs and has been for as long as I can remember playing them.

The issue is that they don't want to make it possible to end up in an unwinnable situation. Which is a games design thing, they want the enemy to "lose entertainingly" instead of trying to beat the player.


Shielding the tank is pretty straightforward since they haven't got rid of that part of the trinity, and I feel cc is an independent mechanic. But yeah, the dispensers likely make it all about potion scumming.

Here, have a consumable

(http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/BG2/Walkthrough2/images/screens/aeries-babyL.jpg)

I don't think the Keep is NDA'ed to the point of not being able to say you're in it? I don't remember clicking anything like that, anyway.

You don't have to micro the barrier stuff if the tactics stuff is available still, and I believe it will be.

You can say if you are in it and that's about all that's allowed, unless it recently changed.

Are we still pretending we care about nda's?

Yes, other than opinions. No specifics or details about stuff under NDA.

 single player NDA now? what are you gonna do, EA? ban me from buying your game?

Nah they'll let you buy it but then you'll ban you from playing it through Origin :awesome_for_real:

So I went to check and turns out they've been allowing more than that for a while.


terribly exciting, I'm sure. :grin:

The fact that I haven't been lynched yet by the beta players here leads me to believe I'm not too far off being bummed out already.   :why_so_serious:

Nobody is playing a beta of Dragon Age 3 as far as I know. Some people are in the beta for the Dragon Age Keep.

If it helps. I'm already tired of your whining. Please don't take my unwillingness to feed the Bioware trolls as a sign of agreement.

Edit: Hey, sorry for the snark. I mistook you for someone else.

Yup, this. I think some youtube channel people were sent earlier build of the game recently to spread the gospel try it out, but if there's any actual beta that goes beyond in house stuff, I haven't heard about it. The :nda: things are about their import-savegame-by-hand website thingie.

I can't wait to play a woman mage tal-vashoth and be a if not the most completely utterly KOS affront to any Qunari we encounter in the game

Good hour and a half stream of multiplayer. (http://www.twitch.tv/bioware/c/5445932)

Hmm...not sure how much I'm going to like that mode.

Doesn't look as good as ME3's multiplayer, but they were also playing low level characters and it was hard to see how classes other than the caster played (they were also only playing the basic classes that start unlocked).

Reviews are appearing:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-11-11-dragon-age-inquisition-review (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-11-11-dragon-age-inquisition-review)

http://www.pcgamer.com/dragon-age-inquisition-review/ (http://www.pcgamer.com/dragon-age-inquisition-review/)

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/11/dragon-age-inquisition-review (http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/11/11/dragon-age-inquisition-review)

I was thinking about getting this next week.  Those reviews have me leaning towards waiting till it's on sale.

Reviews seem to center on complaints like "it's too big" or "tactical camera is tactical"

I'm getting it for the multiplayer and the time wasting.

Me too.  Eventually.  Mostly for the time wasting.

One complaint was that the bad guy wasn't bad enough, we didn't care.

The first bad guy was a nameless archdemon that manifested itself as a dragon you barely if ever saw before the end of the game. But I would bet they lauded the crap out of that story.

"journalism"

Meanwhile, the second game was mostly a Villain of the Week type of story.

I watched the Gamespot review, mostly because I just like Kevin VanOrd.  It was glowing outside of the "it's not very difficult" caveat.  That could honestly be said about all of them (and most RPGs in general) unless you jack up the difficultly.

I wouldn't recommend watching that review, however.  I think I spotted a pretty huge spoiler that I won't be able to get out of my brain before launch.  :sad_panda:

I'm actually really looking forward to this. Been itching for a new RPG to play and this'll do nicely.

When did people start expecting their story-driven RPGs to let them deviate from the story? Because that's what the two reviews I read were complaining about.  As if "The hero Decides, Fuck you all and cleansed the world of all life" was ever going to be a viable option.

As an example.


Wat? So what, you should get to "game over" screens when you make a "BAD" decision? Nah, we had that and people rejected it years ago.

Ditto the complaints about being able to actually complete things without your race being a real factor. No, you don't get to be a Qunari and decide to kill all the mages from the get-go, or a Daelish and decide, "fuck this I'm going back to nature."  Both are a different story & game altogether.

Is this a thread in which we consider the opinion of published games journalists to be in any way relevant? Because I don't think that is something we ever did before.

Dunno, but VanOrd is one of the few that I actually like.  Sure, the reviews scores are usually inflated and the language can get a bit effusive, but he'll let you know what the actually problems worth giving a shit are.  Also helps that he has a seemingly similar taste in games from what I can glean from his reviews.  

I'm just glad McShea's gone so I don't have to sit through one of his attempts to sound intelligent.

Yes, it's sad, I pretty much only count on Gamespot and you all for my video game reviews. :awesome_for_real: I don't think the rest of them are worth it and suffer from a lot of inconsistency in their quality.  

Also, this game sounds like it's fucking long.  RIP FFXIV. I'll be gone for a while.

Yeah, when a reviewer says 50 hours, I know I'm dumping at least 100 into it on the first play through. Fuuuuck.


Fair point, and no. Just something that stuck out as a theme, because "game journalism" now follows narrative threading like all other "journalism."  Probably because they're all getting blown by the same hookers while tweeting at each other.

I read about games here because I get non reviewer opinions. I still read the odd review though. Reading between the lines this game seems to have under-whelmed a few.

PcGames.de. seems to like it.

- Complains mainly technical nature. (Console menus, loading times)
- Combat somewhere between DA:O and 2. More tactical than 2, as least as long one plays with friendly-fire on.
- Very "content heavy". Lots of quests, crafting, dialogs.
- Graphic/optic good, with some bad spots. (overdone wet- and metal- surfaces, darkspawn)

They don't give a score though, as they say they need to play it more to reach a verdict.  :roll:

18/11/14 Guise.
See you in-game.  :awesome_for_real:

Golly I hate crafting.

Then you'll hate online play very much.
Instead of simplifying it to token drops, they continue to drop random crafting shit.
And you can break down un-usable weapons for mats.
Enjoy your RNG.

You are what's wrong with the world. Get your multiplayer out of my single player RPGs!

I like co-op. If they let me play the story in co-op I would, but they don't because they're bastards.

The multiplayer game won't bother single player people at all. They are unconnected for the most part.

La Bomba Gigante has a quick look up: http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-dragon-age-inquisition/2300-9695/

It's pretty at least.

I'm very unimpressed with the visuals, it looks incredibly fake and plastic in that video and in the 10min of streams I watched. I hope that's just a console thing.

On the PC everything looked insanely shiny. Like you could see reflections in lips. I hope there's a way to turn that off, even though they were proud of it in the videos.

Ugh. It's a medieval world where they can barely figure out how to stop demons from ransacking the planet, but A LIPGLOSS IN EVERY POT GUYS!

I love lip gloss.  It's one of my favourite things in the world besides shoes.  I'm still getting it for the 360, though, because after xmas I'm giving the xbox and all it's games and bits to my nephew so he and his woman can play games together.  He even gets my Gold account!  Well, until January when it runs out. 

Not sure wtf is up with Bioware's Dragon Age division. Their arts direction are pretty questionable.
Mass Effect team didn't have noticeable flaws like the DA team did.
Overall, I'm setting my bar of expectations for the graphics prettttty low on this one cause they don't look late 2014 at all.

maybe lipgloss is a demon repellant, similar to how the qunari etch their fucking faces with toxic paint to amp their stats. ferelden had such horrid problems with the blight mostly on account of how not shiny it is.

Gloss, the Bloom effect of 2014.  Fucking graphics artists.

Insert shiny naked Kim Kardashian pic here.

Well, to be positive: As it's so bad that everyone notices it (and even the reviews took it up) it's not unlikely there will be a patch to tone it done. Or alternatively a fan-made post-processing mod.

Or edit the config files. Bloom = 1 is easier to change than ShittyWriting = true.

We'd probably sooner get another screed on gamer entitlement and how we're too stupid to truly appreciate all that is Bioware's genius.

Hobbit.

PC preload available tomorrow at 9 am via Origin I believe. At least for my copy that's what it is showing.

Still can't play it, right?

Right, it doesn't unlock until Tuesday. Although, my Origin says it unlocks Monday at 10 pm, so thereabouts.

I pre-ordered, in large part because I'm an idiot, but also because I'm curious about the multiplayer, due to how good Mass Effect 3's multiplayer was and I got ME3 so late that anything beyond Bronze level was impossible because of how poorly geared my characters are (that and I suck at multiplayer crap that isn't a DIKU MMO..) which was frustrating. Although, I'm not completely sold on the multiplayer they've shown for DA:I. It doesn't seem to have the same feel as ME3's.. in part, I think because of how they've dealt with requiring various classes, regardless of difficulty level -- whereas in ME3 it never seemed to matter much if you had all level 1 soldiers on Bronze, so long as people weren't idiots.

Is there anything of note in the preorder bonuses?  Most stuff looked like weapons or cosmetics. 

I'll say that the DLC weapon packs for DA2 were really useful.  Then again, once you got those, you never needed to pay for weapons or armor again so it made pretty much all the money in the game useless.

Deluxe has the soundtrack, some bonus loot for multiplayer, and some goofy mounts. Regular just has a gear set I think, don't know if it is purely cosmetic or what. Nothing like Sebastian or Shale type 'day 1' DLC this time AFAIK.

Yeah, I picked those up and agree. If I get DA3 I won't pick-up any weapon packs because it largely made finding gear pointless. Since that is a key gameplay point of RPGs for me it was a problem.

I have a deluxe edition because fuck it, why not? The music to DA games has always been hauntingly good to me.

Same. It's a new composer this time (not Inon Zur anymore, now it's Trevor Morris) but everything they've released has been good so far.

I ended up getting the PC version because my nephew is coming up early (not near the holidays at all) and he's taking the 360 back with him... with the already bought 360 version.   :ye_gods:  BUT... I don't mind so much.  It'll be easier to cheat later on.

I would have got Deluxe but GMG had a deal for 20% off and I think Origin is the only place you can get the digital deluxe version. I could have justified paying $10 extra for deluxe, but not almost $20 extra.

Does anyone know how long has it been in the past for a DA / ME franchise-release having it's first "50% off on Halloween weekend/ Bastille day / Eid al-Adha" sale on Origin?

Probably start off with some rounds of multiplayer when this unlocks tomorrow night. Origin name is Velorath if anybody else is planning on getting into multiplayer a bit.

I'll pass on it until I hear some of the player reactions when peopla actually had a chance to play that game. Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 burned me to much to buy this on day 1.

Yesterday while the Broncos were getting their asses handed to them I watched the various game play videos and decided that I could put up with a couple-three hours of collect ten rats to get to the rest of the game so I picked up a preorder.   

Played half an hour.
This is not so good. At all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Rrqo9qXSM&feature=youtu.be

Pro tip: if the weird shiny hair is bugging you, apparently the graphics setting that will fix it is setting mesh quality to high.

Ok, so let me transcribe the video, without editorializing:


The very first frames show the setting. You are traveling in a mountainous region, with copious snow. Disaster strikes from the sky. <Fade to dark>

You wake up on the floor of a vast underground cavern. The character behavior makes clear that you are confused as to why and where.

You seem to be imbued/possessed by some sort of magical force. The ominous green glows suggests it is not a benign effect.

Before you can wonder what this all means an unknown woman person arrives to rescue you.

You are attacked by creatures of the cavern, which seems to trigger [or coincidence?] the magical force inside. Green glow, you pass out, fade to black.

You wake up inside an interrogation cell, tied. Entering the room a is tough interrogator together with a sidekick. You are threatened with execution. People are dead and you are suspiciously the only one alive.

Interrogate leads you outside. A rough-build fortress in a mountains area. Snowfall. Mysterious force in the sky, it triggers the power within you, hurting you. It becomes clear the magical power is getting stronger and will be your end.

We know this because the interrogator says: "Each time the breach expands your mark spreads and it is killing you. It may be the key to stopping this. But there isn't much time. [...]Closing the breach."

To sum up, there is magical force in you that will slowly take you over, if you cannot stop it. The snowy region you are in threatened by is the sudden appearance of a supernatural threat. It is clear that your sudden new power is connected to this threat.

The interrogator unties your chains, but you are not a free man.  The interrogate informs you that you are accused of causing the death of the local ruler. It is clear you will have to co-operate with the interrogator. "You wish to prove your innocene, this is the only way."

The interrogator tells you that you have to go up the mountain head into the valley to test the nature of your magical affliction.

[End of RK video]


Neverwitcher 2 Mask of the Elderscrolls.  :grin:


Edit: I forgot. The interrogator tells suddenly appearing force is a gateway, a portal if you will, beyond which large, powerful, evil beings reside. They are called..eh..something starting with D. 6 letters.

The hair does look silly. I'll be changing that setting.

I'm sorry man, if the SP combat is indicative of what to experience in MP ... then no way it's gonna be a hit.
The ranged combat is the epitome of 'half assed action rpg'
Auto-lock on arrows? What the hell? There's no location damage? Why?! After ME3 showing how it's done?!

I have a writing complaint. The Darkspawn wasn't really a deep or original concept. So I am not holding that against the "Rift" plot. But presentation matters.

Here in DA 3 the interrogator women, who really seems more a soldier-captain rather than a scholar, flatly, without any buildup tells you the deal in the first five minutes of the game:

"Each time the breach expands your mark spreads and it is killing you. It may be the key to stopping this. But there isn't much time." There, done. That was the central concept of the game, we move on.


Then 10 play minutes later:  Literally the second named person you meet in the game, during a fight, and before you introduced yourself, takes your hand, points it against a rift. The rift closes. Fight-scene ends, dialog starts.:

"Closed that thing? How?" "Whatever magic opened the breach in the sky also placed that mark on your hand. I theorized the mark might be able to close the rifts that have opened in the Breach's wave - and it seems I was correct. It seems you hold the key to our salvation." And done. Now you can sleep through the rest of the conversation without missing the plot.


That just seems...low effort? Or is it me?

You just jam it in, Cal.
JAM. IT. IN.

You got the touch!  You got the Pow-Aaaaaaaaah!

Fapping jokes always make bad games better.

Also, late to the party, as I haven't watched any videos prior to this but... that hair. ... THE FUCK? That is fucking amateur hour.

I would LOVE to see a video recording of the idiotic conversation they had at Bioware the day they agreed on the shiny hair.

It's like they took all the digs about their plastic/Play-Doh hair over the years and decided "Let's really make it plastic for DA3!".

It had to go through multiple art directors until finally some creative directory muckety-muck at Bioware signed off on it. Which means multiple people looked at it and thought, "Yeah, that's looks good!"

The hair seems to be a bug - it didn't look like that in any of the trade show previews - and is also kind of a non-issue, since there's a setting you can change to fix it right now (at least on the PC version.)

"I got a fever, and the only prescription is more shiny!" Yeah, it's so stupid it would only make sense in a gag.

Might be coming across a little to strong on the fan side here.

 :heartbreak:

Yes, please, let's not slow down on shitting on something about the look of hair and lip gloss before we've played it.

Yeah this is GOTY material right here. 10 years ago maybe.
You're Zhangief's son who has a green hand that can close Oblivion portals.
:effort:

What else will we talk about?

Lasagne assembled and baking, work tasks finished, chores completed, showered -- I'm ready to be disappointed in 1 hour 17 minutes* :awesome_for_real:

* In the game, not the lasagne

Were DA's animations always that stilted and I didn't notice because it was good at the time or has the animation quality really dropped since the last game?  Shiny hair aside (which is just a shader error from the looks) they looked jankier than a second year CG student's animations in RK's video. WTF.

Yes they always sucked.

Shiny hair is reported to be fixed by cranking mesh quality to the highest setting.

Just finished dinner, starting some laundry, no meetings until 3pm tomorrow... I am prepared for some DA:I launch night RPG'ing.

Guess I'll apply any windows updates and gpu driver updates now.

Stuffed on lasagne, 3 more minutes to go, hopefully I don't FAAK.

LOL there's a line to use dragonagekeep.com (to setup a previous state to import).

Shiny hair was fixed by bumping settings from medium to high for me (thank god, I was really worried about the game had that been intentional).

About three hours in. The controls and camera are a bit wonky, but its starting to feel more natural. Figured out a few minor things - walk near objects and hit F rather than trying to highlight and right click for example. Don't care much for the tactical view so far, find myself just hitting pause in combat, planning out what I'm going to do and then unpausing. We'll see how it gets when I reach the point of needing to control more than just my lead character. Combat feels somewhere between one and two so far. Less "turn basey" than one, but not the over the top action game combat of two. Animations are definitely stilted, but overall the game is gorgeous to look at.

Time for bed.

I've only put about 90 minutes into the game so far, my quick impressions;

- Controls just feel wrong to me, at least as a sword and board warrior. Everything is just clunky, especially given the...
- Camera is just, ugh. Can't zoom out far enough before triggering the tactical cam.. wherein you can't zoom out far enough for easy use. Also didn't seem able to easily use the mouse to give certain orders, had to use wasdqe for things like movement.
- Animations felt stilted, as others have said, and continually threw me off, especially in combat.
- Instead of the tried and true 'hold key to highlight loot/clickables' they went to a pulse system on key press (but not hold). Irritated the shit out of me, especially paired with the issues I have with the camera.
- Combat isn't, as Bunk put it, "turn basey" enough for me; I actually really liked the combat system in DA:O (never gave a shit enough about DA2 to buy the game) and this game lost a bit of that. Sword and board feels.. wonky in this combat system. About to try a mage and see how that compares.
- Had no graphical issues whatsoever, but I have everything on High.. tempted to run a few to Ultra and see if it makes my 680s melt. Nor any bugs or crashes (yet?).

Hoping I adjust to the controls and camera, because as is.. it is fairly annoying. I am enjoying the game, however, in spite of it.

Unlocked this early using a VPN and spent way too much time playing. Only a couple hours of single player, but maybe 5-6 hours of multiplayer. Tried it with and without using a controller but I can't say that I have a preference so far. I do have a couple of nitpicks with the multiplayer. The first is that unlike in ME3 where you could get chests with a guaranteed rare, you'll often get chests here that have a bunch of underwhelming items. They aren't entirely useless because you can salvage them for crafting materials which you'll need to do if you want to unlock other classes. This leads to my other nitpick, which is that crafting feels incredibly clunky. I'm sure it's partly so that people can unlock the classes that they want as opposed to ME3 which was completely random, but it just doesn't feel particularly well done.

All that aside, after getting over the learning curve I'm really liking the multiplayer a lot. Especially since I unlocked the Kitari class, which feels like the Qunari version of a Krogan Vanguard. After getting him up a few levels it's so much more fun to play than any of the starting classes and I don't even have a particularly great weapon for him yet. Managed to beat the last two rounds I did without and was topping the group in medals. Trying to unlock Assassin next because I have two rare daggers just sitting around right now. Also found a unique staff which isn't bad although it's not particularly high level.

Single player seems ok, especially once you fix the hair thing. After the first part of the game it feels like it opens up a bit, with the first area you go being a decent size and having a good number of quests. Of course one of them is "kill Rams and bring back 10 Ram Meat" which is the kind of filler we really should be able to move past at this point especially since it sounds like the game would still be plenty long without it. The camera is a bit wonky as Ceryse said. Can't speak too much to the controls since I've mostly been doing multiplayer which doesn't require managing a party, and the single player stuff I've done so far is easy enough still that I haven't had to manage my party there too much either.

Overall, I'm having a pretty good time with it so far.

Hey, I am totally gonna get the game and I am almost certainly gonna enjoy it. That doesn't change that the lip gloss and hair stuff is ridiculous and deserves to be bashed and made fun of. It's not ripping the game (yet).

I didn't play much since I have a bulk of time later this week, but I struggled with the character creator to make something that looked half decent. Just did the first tutorial combat and the biggest thing I noticed, coming straight from DA2, was that I couldn't just click on a target and have my Rogue move to them and attack. Spent too much time just standing there swinging my daggers at nothing.

I imagine that will just be something I get used to, or I'll find what there 'move to this target and stab' button is.

Glad I got all my Keep stuff done a week or so ago - it imported fairly easily.

Not a bug, more like playing the game only on high settings and never realizing how bad it looks on the lower ones. Or realizing and not caring.

But speaking of dev meetings leading to stupid decisions, I'd really like to hear that one which resulted in having the game completely ignore kb+m when you enable the controller, and vice-versa. Because it's sort of idiocy that you specifically have to code.

Works especially well when the game decides you have the controller plugged in, and you don't actually have any. :awesome_for_real:

Weird, I had my controller plugged into my PC the whole time I played with no issues.

Do you mean you've played the game with kb+m and not with the controller, even though the controller was plugged in? Yes, that's doable. The game ignores the controller in favour of the kb+m by default, and there's switch in the options for that.

The problem can occur if you either toggle the controls scheme manually to the controller (and then turns out the game doesn't know how to handle your controller) or if the game by itself decides that you desire the controller controls (and you don't have one). As that effectively leaves you stuck with the "press Start" screen., no actual way to press Start and no apparent way to make the game switch back to paying attention to kb+m.

When I first fired my game up it had the 'Press Start' screen and I just hit space bar and it started up. I just used KB+M the rest of the way.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As you said though, I never touched the switch in options.

Got about 4-5 hours into it last night. It's huge. It seems likely based on what I've seen from the first full zone that there's easily 80-100+ hours of stuff to do. I have some interface nitpicks but it's pretty great so far.

I played a bit last night and I'm not really liking it so far.  The UI is not great, everything is way too shiny, using the mousewheel activates the tactical camera instead of zooming out and combat is bad, esp. melee.  The combat was so bad I restarted the game over, switching from 2h warrior to archer.  The story has been ok so far and the voice acting is good but it was just frustrating as he'll to play.

I've played enough to realize that I'm not going to finish this before spring.  There's just too many distractions available.  Mostly I like the game, but to echo other folks I really want the DAO tactical view back.  The console like menus made me a little crazy at first but I am getting used to them, but the exit the war room button should really be called Exit the War Room and not Back.

I like it pretty much.  What's up with my posture?  I have slumpy round shoulders and I hate the way I walk. 

What I love most so far:  clipboards with candles stuck on them.  That's just too funny!

(http://i62.tinypic.com/2lbddv8.jpg)

It's a really small thing but it really bothers me that the two guys pounding on swords in the smithy are holding them a good six inches above the anvil.

The squatting loot animation with your arms straight out flailing away always cracks me up.

Agree so far on camera and combat taking some getting used to.

Hair is not shiny in mine, nor are lips particularly extraordinary in their glossiness. Perhaps I clutched my pearls harder than other folks and so I got a special copy or something.

BTW, in case you had not heard, a bunch of PC users are unable to get the game to run at all.  Launches, get the EA screen, then a save game notice, then nothing but a black screen with a cursor.
Initially, EA support tried to blame this on people only have dual core processors when the requirements clearly state quad core.  But a bunch of quad core people have it too.
Speculation that it's the new DRM scheme since DA3 uses the frostbyte engine which supported Dual core's just fine for other games....

And yeah, I'm one of the unlucky ones :)

So, buyer beware.

Hair is semi-normal looking with the mesh quality set to high. Anything below... welp, you have the game, you can check out for yourself. Let us know the results :why_so_serious:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/daily/73/kill-yourselves.png)

Goddamn.
God.Fucking.Damn.

This wasn't obvious during character creation?  Seemed pretty obvious.  Why give the choice otherwise?

It's actually worse than that. You can't switch weapons like from dual wield to bow while in combat. This is more restrictive than the previous games and working as intended.

To clarify while it's true that the card choice at the beginning implies some fixed weapon loadout when you level up and look at your skills you aren't locked to the skills associated with the weapon you picked at the start and you even pick up different weapon types early on that you can switch to (like my dual wielder picked up a bow that I now hunt with) if you want to. However the game still doesn't let you switch during combat basically forcing down one path for most of your combat.

Prediction: This is going to be one of the most overrated games of 2014 with the highest number of apologists per intelligent gamer ever made.

I don't know -- Destiny is going to be tough competition.

Prediction: Some people will like the game despite its flaws. Also, schild will never play the game making it impossible for him gauge the accuracy of his prediction.

I've played the game.  I think schild will be right.

Well we've already set the bar pretty low since Ingmar was just about called an apologist for suggesting the hair thing might be a bug and mentioning that it's easily fixable in the settings. So by that standard, sure there's going to be a lot of "apologists".

The problem I have with that kind of reasoning is that these are the sort of glaringly obvious errors that should have come up during testing and they are bothersome enough and reasonably easy enough to fix that - as a project manager - I wouldn't accept a "will not fix" from development for any of those. At least include a fix in the day one patch you're going to push out anyway.

I wouldn't label anyone an apologist who points out that it's not that big of a deal. I'm always bothered though when something that probably is a minor yet glaringly obvious issue makes it into the final game. I always wonder if they deal with more severe issues the same way if they can't be bothered to fix something anyone notices off the bat.

Played all last night, ran a bow rogue, shield warrior and mage through he prologue, my impressions (Nightmare difficulty with friendly fire turned on - PC):

1.  Controls are ass, but not quite as bad as the whining had led me to believe.  Tac camera is only useful for re-positioning during combat regular camera should be used for everything else.  Melee is practically unplayable due to the wonky controls and the lack of auto move.  Save yourself a headache and play a ranged class until they get this sorted.

2.  Instead of chugging a thousand potions you will be spamming abilities that give you guard and shield.  The AI is pretty good about using guard skills appropriately/whenever they are up but is a lot less intelligent about barrier use, I would recommend micromanaging barrier through the more difficult fights.

3.  The story is hilari-bad.  It's like they decided to to combine Mask of the Betrayer with Skyrim and added a dash of Oblivion and say "look at the neat thing we did."  Also a large contingent of folks wanting  seems difficult to comprehend.

4.  The final fight on the prelude was hella annoying but not due to any inherent difficulty, but because the fight wasn't with the bad dude, but with your controls.    This is really unacceptable, FFS it is your opening section!  That shit should be polished to a fine gleam.

5.  Varrics back!  This is a good thing, he will never leave my party.

I look at games as someone looking for entertainment, not as a project manager. Maybe that's part of the reason why I'm more positive about the current state of video games than you. That's not a knock against you. I had a harder time watching movies on film after doing a job that required me to be able to notice even small scratches, dirt, bulb flickering, overshoots, etc...

My experiences playng Skyrim, NWN2, and the Witcher each involved running into a bug in a main story quest that prevented me from progressing and each required me to look online in forums for a console command to work around the issue (except in the case of the Witcher where I just gave up because I wasn't having fun with it anyway). In the cases of NWN2 and Skryim I was fortunate in that I was playing them well after release and people had come up with workarounds. Now that I think about it, the second main story quest in Skryim I had bug out on me is what got me to stop playing that as well. I had put a lot of time into it, had fun with it and still might go back to it, but it is what is. Something like the DA:I hair thing almost hardly seems noting.

I think not being able to switch weapons in combat though is a valid complaint though. You could do it in DA:O (don't remember if it was in DA2 or not) and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't have been in this.

You auto-move when attacking in tactical view, and you can position it so that it's almost the same as regular view.  You just need to get used to moving the camera around independently.

The story really is bad, though.  "Here are the keys the the inquisition.  Please make all major decisions for us, Stranger We Mistrusted An Hour Ago."

Played for three hours last night.

The initial build up is a little slow, mostly because I've seen it already in other Bioware videos. The controls are fine for my tastes on the PC, and they take a second to get used to but not much. My biggest issue is remembering the difference between left clicking to shoot and right clicking to move my camera. Sometimes I think I'm in Diablo and go CLICK THERE! And I end up firing my bow into the ground.

Playing as an archer is easy if not a little predictable in the early game since you don't have many abilities. Mainly you plink plink plink BIG SHOT plink plink plink plink EXPLOSIVE SHOT plink plink plink. This is more engaging on bigger fights and downright easy on the boss I faced. I'm betting things will get more dicey with bigger bosses like dragons as the game moves on, and I'll likely have to manage more than myself. The one boss I did face the adds didn't like me at all. I'm playing on normal though.

The healing thing is hardly noticable other than the fact you don't regen OOC. I sort of like the system, and the AI for the most part handles itself so I can plink plink plink. Hair is a non-issue on high, expect for facial hair. Seriously, facial hair looks fucking ridiculous. The fact that made it past QA means somebody on the graphics team should be fired. And i'm no graphics whore at all if you remember my love of Mount and Blade, but Mount and Blade beards looks more realistic on their character models than this shit.


That mustache looks stupid. And that's just one random pic I found. My mustache on my character I made is even dumber. It annoyed me for some reason.

After you get past the on rails part of the game and get to the warmap feature, you open up areas to explore. I'm not kidding when I say I was overwhelmed. I just wandered about for 2 hours in the hinterlands finding new WoW-type quest exclaimations and finished quests. That was only like 10% of the map. They are huge. It also tracks where you went with a line on the map, so you can see how you were running around like a jackass. Also I would imagine it's important for the explorer type who wants to remember where he went to find something.

The tactical feature camera is dumb, but I knew it would be dumb when they constantly mentioned it in videos. Anytime a dev pimps something like that as a feature like they are proud of it, you know it's going to work like shit. It's a given. And it does work like shit. The main reason is that you are used to WASD for moving and turning, but when given a tool like that you're used to WASD moving the screen. NOPE. A and D rotate the camera on it's axis. It's...stupid. I hope I can change that on keymaps, and if not it will get modded, because it's wonky as fuck.

I think the large map features really speak to me as an explorer-achiever type. All the quests and options totally took me away from the fact that I completely ignored the reason I was there, which had something to do with a warmap quest. I just lauched off to build camps, slay templars, and find resources. I can already tell resources and crafting are going to be weird but incredibly useful. The system is standard resources + other resources = items. But they have different abilities based on core components, then you can upgrade based on other components, and then you can get new recipes from drops, I believe. I'll geek out over this most likely.

Story is silly, but I expected that. MASSIVE RIFTS, PRISONER WE ARE GOING TO EXECUTE, BUT YOUR HAND IS GLOWING, YOU ARE THE HERALD. It's basically TES: Oblivion, but with a darker tone and less dead Emperor. This time you have a dead Divine! Oh the changes we make. What was Oblivion like 10 years ago? Glad to see we've run out of story themes and ideas. Luckily I bought this for the large world and the multiplayer, so I'm sure story whores will be all sad panda. I could care less. Seriously, I can't emphasize enough how much this story felt ripped off from the Elder Scrolls. If I was an Elder Scrolls dev, I'd have already congratulated them on remaking my game 10 years later on Twitter, just to stick it to them.

All in all, it's fun. I don't think you have to apologize to see the fun unless you're already pissed off about it not blowing you on the first day. My expectation was open world areas with lots of quests, decent combat, fun side missions and part one-liners, and lots to do and upgrade. This delivers on that expectation.

Don't get me wrong I am having fun, and this is really scratching an itch i have had for a while, so good on them.  I think the controls will be eventually fixed on the Pc so I will just save my melee playthrough for when that is sorted out.

I can't play this game on action mode.
I guess I gotta try to master the tacticool mode to get semblance of plan done.
It's just impossible to get any idea of precision in the combat clusterfuck.

Controls aren't ideal, but they are workable and I imagine they will improve when Bioware or modders get off their duff.  I guess it depends on your tolerance for micromanaging.

Played for another four or five hours yesterday and came to the conclusion that its only playable on the PC with a controller. Especially as a melee. I fully understand the complaints about the kb/mouse and why people on PC want to use the kb/mouse - as Stewie said to me this morning "Why didn't I just get it on XBox then?"

Once I got past all that - I found a game that really plays to my exploring/gathering/hording playstyle.

I upgraded to the latest nVidia driver and it now crashes the game for me, so I guess I'll be troubleshooting that today.

Thanks to a tip in this thread I now pretty much use f to do any rift, loot, or object interactions.  It makes life much easier.

I picked it up for  XBone. The single player is so-so, but I think MP would be fun with some coordination.

So... anyone on Xbox?

Is anyone else upset that they seem to have watered down leveling even further?  Why can't I allocate my own attribute points anymore?  Also, there seem to be fewer skills to choose from.

Otherwise known as "It's a post-EA takeover Bioware game."

I'm now 12 hours or so into the game (spread out, granted.. five of that on my sword and board, rest on a mage), and my take on the game hasn't changed much. It is enjoyable.. but, god damn. Some design decision were clearly made by someone with no clue or fucks given. My main, 'wtf!?' gripes are;

- Camera, as expounded upon by many, including myself. It is just laughable.
- Behaviour system*, more on this.. just, tldr; shit.
- Having to manually auto attack; imo, this with movement and camera issues is what makes melee simply fucking unplayable.

Everything else is either what I expected (plot is bad, but it is a Bioware game and they suck at plot) or annoying, but manageable (I have to use Inquisition perks to get a bigger fucking inventory, because special people will sew more pockets into my clothes? Seriously?), or a limitation due to engine choice (modding; god I wish I could change some default clothing choices.. the Inquisitor's non-combat look is... bad).

But, god damn. The behaviour system is what is now making me almost furious. You went from a fantastic tactics and behaviour system in DA:O, where I could specify to my party when, where, and how to use skills/spells. Now? I can tell them to follow or defend certain characters (and defend, imo, is shitty, as half the time they can't actually do fuck all due to cooldowns), special resource (mana, stamina) thresholds to not doing anything below (ugh), what thresholds to use potions at, and what threshold of potion count to not using potions. Oh, and which skills they can and cannot use (but it is merely an on/off switch only...). Guarantees I will never play this game on anything above Normal because micro-managing the party would then be required, which means using the Tac View which is just crap. Even on normal I'm having to micro-manage because Solas/whomever can't be trusted to barrier responsibly. Tank dying? Barrier people not taking damage!

My mage is relatively enjoyable so far.. mainly because I grabbed barrier, can stay at range and just pewpew.. but I picked my warrior back up before quitting this morning and I couldn't take more than five minutes of trying to play a tank. It is just.. unplayable, imo, as a melee on the pcp with keyboard and mouse. I hate having to use a controller; I suck at controllers (mainly because I don't use the damn things). I refuse to use a controller. This means about half the classes are unplayable for me (warrior class and the melee rogue varients) because these peopel don't have a clue how to design for a pc game control scheme. Which, I guess is fine.. still leaves at least two playthroughs of a very long game I enjoy, so I'm going to get my money's worth; it just grates on you how badly designed a game like this, in this day and age, is.

Western RPGs that have good plots. Discuss. Planescape Torment and then what?

Because I keep thinking that folks talk like there's some RPG gold standard where you are not improbably chosen to be important and central to major events and so on. Dragon Age's setting at least has some nice wrinkles or variants in it with the standard Tolkien-esque elements of dwarves/elves, magic, dragons, etc. But Bioware's strength is usually in the characters and character-related mini-plots and sometimes in the branching choices you're asked to make, not in the main plot. I'm just not sure there are Western RPGs that have main plots that you'd call "strong" in the sense of surprising, interesting, mature, not riddled with cliches, etc.

The camera and combat I think you can reasonably say, "This did not need fixing, you had it right the last time around, why?" But if the objection is "How ridiculously improbable that I go from being suspect to protagonist right off the bat" and so on, you're really saying, "I hate fantasy RPGs". It's a bit like showing up in a superhero movie/TV thread and talking about how the powers of the characters wouldn't work like that in real life--that's not a meaningful criticism of a specific decision the creators made, that's just rejecting the whole thing.

In Dragon Age: Origins , the main character wasn't the Chosen One.  He was just a lucky survivor, and the only other one didn't want to lead because of self-confidence issues.  This time around, it's less than 30 minutes into the game before people who should be wary of you are letting you into secret council meetings and ordering the spymaster around.  In my particular playthrough, 30 minutes after that one of them is saying she heard some nasty rumors about my character, and is *shocked* to learn that he was a member of a violent dwarven carta.  Well, maybe they shouldn't have been so quick to make the shady amnesiac dawrf their leader, then.

I just question all of their decision-making skills.  When can I choose some new advisors?

You don't need to play a game to extrapolate results based on player reaction aaaaaaaaaaaand all the instant messages I got saying what utter shit it is.

It feels to me like the intro to the story is rushed through because they want to get you out into the more open-world/building up your power base part of the game. Once you're through the EXPOSITION! part at the beginning, it settles down and the story stuff gets much better.

Melee controls really are pretty annoying - though not unplayable, IMO - and the tactical mode camera is as bad as everyone says it is. Mostly the issue is that now that we're in an open world with elevation changes and trees and stuff everywhere, and that stuff can get in the way sometimes. It also needs to be able to zoom back farther than it does currently. My other two nitpicks are that holding L+R isn't auto run (and I can't map that) and that I don't automatically walk over to use things I've got highlighted if I'm out of range. I wish fast travel back to home base put you closer to the war table room.

Other than that though? The game is a lot of fun and after the rushed intro the writing is as good as ever, at least for the first 11 hours or so. The big open maps are full of explorer candy too.

DA:O has you fairly quickly being the leader because of a crisis. It's a pretty standard trope. "Oh, you're just a farmboy but you're going to have to grow up fast because the kingdom needs you!"  

Just about no Western RPG ever has you wandering around just being a guy who has some abilities having regular old adventures in the style of a pen-and-paper campaign. I suppose some action RPGs/roguelikes are like that but I think folks wouldn't generally commend those as having "plots".  If you play Elder Scrolls games where you ignore the main plot, I suppose those are a bit like that, but that's essentially plotless-ness, not "other plot". The Witcher series has some more political/gritty turns of plot and character. But other than Planescape, I'll be switched if I can think of an RPG that has a story that would seem anything other than generic and full of improbable moments that make the player-character central to the action. Then again, that's mostly true of fantasy novels, actually. The ones with distinctive plots and mood generally wouldn't work as RPG-style games.

In several of the DA:O origin stories, the Warden starts out as the son of an influential noble or ruler, so that wasn't necessary a farmboy either.  I suppose I haven't gotten far enough into the open-world stuff, but the initial impression of the story and writing was pretty bad.  First impressions matter.

Still going to play it, but so far it has been begrudgingly.  At least that tactical camera doesn't bother me nearly as much as it seems to bother everyone else, and allows for auto-move while attacking.

For an 80-hour plus game, I'm a bit puzzled about why first impressions matter, actually. I can think of at least ten unambiguously great games that had fairly dumb tutorial beginnings.

Because first impressions being good will compel you to play the rest of the game more likely than a shitty first impression.

Do you even game, bro?

Is it so wrong to want a game to start out strongly?  I'm going to be spending 80 hours with these characters, they should be trying to make me think they're not all morons from the beginning.  Again, DA:O started off really strongly.  I think I just wanted Origins all over again.  I really liked that game.

For the record, I don't particularly care that the main plotline is basically a Greatest Hits of Bethesda Soft.  I just want the characters to do things that make sense to me.

I haven't played much yet but I don't understand the PC melee control complaints. I've opened the world map twice so far as a dual wield rogue (restarted once to fix my nose) and I don't have issues positioning myself in combat. Of course the first control change I made to the game was swapping the turn and strafe keys.* This also fixes the tactical view map scrolling.

* I hope there's a special circle of hell reserved for those that keep insisting on putting the turn keys on A D in games that favor the mouse for turning where they spend eternity turning too far and can never get to where they want to go.

I'm just waiting for the big reveal where it turns out you are really Darth Revan and you opened the Rift in the first place*

It's also really annoying that the game gives you no clue that you have to look up at the rift while you are standing underneath it to see the teeny tiny hotspot. I almost wiped the first time through cause I ran around for minutes trying to figure out how to disrupt the rift. It's also annoying that F doesn't seem to work and you have to use right click to trigger it.

* I've actually just started so I don't know what the actual twist in the story actually is, don't blame me if my prediction turns out to be true :why_so_serious:

f works for me when I close a rift, I don't even bother to look for the hotspot.

Yeah - F will interact with any interactable you're close enough to.

If you want to loot things without using the mouse, I think it's F then hit spacebar to just grab everything.

I just thought the first boss was intentionally unbeatable.  Took me a few tries.

If something is overrated then there have to be a lot of people saying that its good. The only way you're going to determine that their opinion is "wrong" without actually playing the game is by cherry picking comments people make to you that support the position you've already decided to take which is essentially to preemptively shit on people who like something you don't. I don't even think the game is particularly great. It's a good RPG that unfortunately has some flaws so I'm not really inclined to sit here defending it, but given that you don't like Bioware, and if I'm not mistaken refuse to buy EA games and probably refuse to install Origin on your PC, the only reason you clicked on this thread was for the sake of being a dick.

schild, being a dick? Shocking!

The first boss mechanic was a bit wonky.  I couldn't figure it out at first and nearly wiped.  Please games, hiding shit in a green cloud is just being mean to me.

I don't love the controls, but I can live with them. People seem to love the gamepad controls, so I could always try those.  But I'm probably going to be a stubborn bastard and not bother.  :awesome_for_real:

Me, too, because the gamepad is all the way over there somewhere.

Yeah it works for me for the little ones. However it didn't work for me with the big event one.

I didn't know about the option when I started so I did the hunt and click thing on the big one and it was frustrating as hell for me.

Just got it, not reading this thread for spoilers, and I'm disappointed they don't import old saves though I appreciate the effort they put into Keep.

But quoting this because I agree. Even in the game, the graphics remind me of that Lord of the Rings Conquest game they picked up by way of Pandemic (by way of Elevation). Aside from that game itself sucking hard, the visuals were bright and colorful and totally at odds with the gravity of the situation they were trying to convey.

I'm heavily biased though coming right off of Shadows of Mordor, which really nailed the hell out of everything graphics and behavior. It spoiled me, especially on the wooden acting I've seen so far in DA3.

Not saying I'm not enjoying the game, just that it's been a jarring transition.

Honestly, if I could get a refund I would.  I really wanted to play as a melee character but as it stands now its almost unplayable with a m&k, esp. with the wonky camera.  I don't care how good the rest of the game is.  If its clunky as fuck to play, then why bother?

(https://i.imgur.com/hRfEcfa.png)

I had horrible hitching both in and out of cut scenes. The new NVIDIA driver that came out yesterday fixed that issue for me. The issue with cut scenes playing back at no faster than 30fps can be hacked with command line parameters:

http://www.reddit.com/r/dragonage/comments/2mm319/dragon_age_inquisition_30fps_cutscene_framerate/

You can get a refund within 24 hours of starting the game.
I went past that mark already. :(

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829607/daily/73/wonderful2.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/KB002oM.jpg)

Considering that you allow impressions you've formed from people instant-messaging you to control what you think of a game, I think I'm a bit closer to actually gaming.

RK, have you seen the last the last Southpark?

He must be taking the piss. Who says "I hate myself that I was not able to provide you an immediate solution".

And the line is soo close to the Southpark-indian-guy line too...

No, I only watch shitty anime and weaboo material.
Not american parody shows with shallow depth and self-ironic commentary on real life bullshit.
:edgyasfuck: LEAVE KUMAR ALONE

So did I. :heartbreak:

I thought I saw somebody mention this earlier though I can't find it at the moment but the radar "pinging" thing is really really stupid.

Overall the sense I get is that they moved to a more open environment for movement and exploration, with a Z axis, without really understanding the implications--they did some awkward half-way adaptations of combat, looting, healing etc. that range from being annoying to really bad. Combat is just flat-out aggravating once you're out in the open world. I appreciate getting off the rails, and having an environment chock-full of interesting stuff to see and do, but they needed to just flat-out rethink other typical Bioware design paradigms along the way. Certainly this part of the game is bad enough to affect how people rate the game.

I do like the storytelling and character work--it draws me in a lot. And the sense of lots of stuff going on is good. For me at least the graphics are good, but I'm on a brand-new machine that's fairly high-end.

I wonder if I'll get a better and less problematic version by waiting a couple of months. Do you think they might tune the camera issues and the mouse and keyboard alleged problems?

How? All the preview vids they showed off had every developer playing this game on gamepad.
It's almost like we're crazy by sticking to KB+M setups.

I do hope they manage to improve the kb/m experience, but I've already accepted that I'm going to play this with a controller. Melee isn't perfect that way, you still deal with attacking thin air when not paying attention, but overall I'm finding the combats fun with my rogue. Will be interesting when things get harder - finally had my first character drop in a fight against some rage demons near the edge of the Hinterlands. I have a feeling the "easiness' of the game early on may come back to bite me.

Despite the flaws, the game has me hooked. I spent an hour last night just running around in Haven - which is really just supposed to be the equivalent of Origin's Party Camp. The game just comes across as utterly immense.

You are. Games from studios like this are developed for consoles, not PCs. We've all done this dance before and should know better by now. Some studios do ports OK, but those are exceptions, not the norm. PCs are an after-thought port that get optimizations down the line, IF they sold the magic number of copies to bother with supporting them.  Consoles won the AAA game race ages ago.

I wasn't expecting anything to get lauded here, but damn yall are nitpicking some crazy shit in this thread.

Yeah KB&M gets wonky at times, it's always wonky now. If they develop both (which they always do) I don't think you're allowed to complain about this anymore. We know this going in. We're the dinosaurs here. You either adapt, mod, or get a controller for your PC. Not getting a controller or complaining about having to use a controller is get off my lawn territory.

Game's fun to me. Exploring? Fun. Doing lots and lots of random shit for quests? Fun. Upgrading things? Fun. Inquisition map and followers? Fun. Story and cutscenes, not bad past the intro. I don't really get the point of mounts yet, but I'm in the first area still after 6 hours. I like finding stuff. I like the quicktravel options too. Shooting stuff with a bow is fun now, where before in DA:O it was completely cocknozzle.

I definitely didn't expect this game to be developed for consoles and joypads considering Dragon Age 1 and Dragon Age 2 were working perfectly on PC, to the point consoles felt like an afterthought and not the other way around.

Ok, now have gotten crazy! (sorry)

Having keyboard and mouse control work properly is not something niche like asking for Track IR or mufti-monitor support. It the most basic thing, and and being to told to "move on" in crazy in this context.

Personally I don't know anyone who plays that way. Neither is it a subject that I come across when lurking in gaming forums.

You could see the trend developing.  If you don't think DA2 was influenced by a desire to shift emphasis to consoles and to cash in on the success on the franchise, then I don't know what to tell you.  

That being said, I'm doing OK with the controls barring one issue: spacebar.   :awesome_for_real: I keep wanting to use it for pause, and I keep jumping instead.  I may need to switch up control and spacebar, but then I fear my bunny hopping will suffer.  I haven't had to use tactical view very often but I suppose it might help with some of these higher level fights that are kicking my ass (lvl 12 rift in a low level area, etc).

Except Dragon Age 2 played horribly with a joypad as opposed to Keybord and Mouse. So there's that.

Wouldn't be surprised given its incredibly short development cycle and problems that arose from that.

Between re-mapping keybinds and almost never going into tactical view I've largely gotten used to the controls (so long as I'm not playing a melee character.. I still just can not tolerate it), and I expected keyboard and mouse controls to be wonky (it's a bad sign when all dev streams and such use the controller), I just never expected it to be as bad as it is; especially with regards to the camera and needing to manually auto-attack. I still struggle at times with the controls, but.. ugh. The ping and lack of tactics still bug the shit out of me. Thankfully, I'm playing on Normal and unless something over-levels me I'm not having too much of an issue; largely done the Hinterlands now (I have two side quests there left, and a number of those level 12 rifts). Surprised I haven't gotten to the Skyhold part yet, given I've already recruited Sera, Vivienne, Blackwall and could get Iron Bull if I opened up his area.

Met my first dragon. Laughed when its first fireball from the sky killed three of my party (although, that was three levels ago, and I'm level 9 or 10 now).

Battles got a lot easier once I learned two things; prioritize any talent will Guard generation for Cass, and learn how to do combos.. as they do a shit-ton of damage.

Oh, and bears suck. Especially when three of them and four assassin type lyrium smugglers literally spawn on top of you (another pet peeve.. shit shouldn't respawn on top of you, ever).

Story has gotten a bit better and I've yet to run into any technical issues outside of the occasional texture flicker.. though a lot of characters do stupid stuff in conversations (Varrick likes to do squats while we talk..) but the game is enjoyable for all of its flaws. A little common sense, however, and it could have been so much better.

Yeah I laughed when I first saw that. Cryptic, among other companies, solved that in City of Heroes back in 2004.

I expect the spawning issue to get addressed fairly quickly, along with the control issues on PC with the tactical cam and melee. I can very easily see a backslide on the PC "auto attack" once you click something. Right now clicking on the mouse makes zero sense.

I did find a stupid bug where one of my quest guys was invisible. Upon relogging he came back. Probably out taking a dump in the bushes.

To me trying to play a melee character using kb/m felt similar to trying to play Skyrim with kb/m in third person view. Not good.
They really should have had a tool tip come up in the first two minutes to tell you to hit F to activate everything - the mouse targeting/right click is abysmal.

This is honestly my biggest complaint with the game. In DA:O, when you clicked something it moved you to the object. In this game? HAHA FUCK YOU NOPE!

There's zero reason for that change. It's the absolute worst thing they did because it's literally involved in everything you do. Also the view on clicking Rifts sucks. If they changed that it would open up worlds of difference in the feel of the game to me.

Mind you, some people who tried there would then experience regular crashes that went away when they got rid of this command line thing. Just something to be wary of, if your game is crashing.

Also, it apparently really doesn't like any sort of overlay programs running (fraps, the ones coming with some graphics card and whathaveyou)

You can hold down R for autoattack as well, it's much less awkward for me than using the mouse for attacking. Still not what I'd prefer.

Yeah that helps me zero, too. If I'm holding down a button, I'm just as easily activating a button. The difference is purely annoyance from the developers.

Finally, a way to stop having a heart attack every time I get an achievement:

Thank you.

Damn that thing was annoying.

I cannot play the game for more than 20 minutes before it crashes with an DirectX error.

Huh, added an autoattack toggle by using AutoHotKey script.
This somehow fixes the annoyance of wasting a finger to continually swing attacks.

Eh, I actually feel like it's still not that awesome with a controller, though.  Both control styles manage to feel like you're playing it with the "wrong" input device, somehow.  It's an impressive trick.

I am really enjoying it other than that, though.

See I think the underlying tone of this game is that for the most part people enjoy it a good bit. The complaints are that it feels weird in combat, or that elements the devs thought were spectacular in fact suck (which is usually the case).

I made a ranged character first to specifically avoid the melee control him-hams. This is actually the reverse of how I normally place, which is as a tank. Now I will likely do that in multiplayer where I'm not worried about tactical camera.

There are a number of fixes posted in various places for this, and they do apparently work.

I sincerely can't use the tactical camera.
Every time I want to switch to another party member, the camera re-centers on that party member for no reason, forcing me to renavigate the camera to the enemy's position again just to order an attack.
Next party member. Camera snaps on new member. Repeat.
ASdsadagb
Pisses me off.

It's not predictable for me, but I am getting a fair number of crashes.

I got this error a couple of times, too.  There was an Nvidia driver update the other day and I just dl'd it.  Hopefully this will fix it.  The one difference I noted after the dl was that I can now optimise the game through Nvidia where I couldn't before.  There's also some fixes posted on websites but they all seemed to be a pain so I didn't bother.  Some people claim they fixed it by playing in fake full screen and changing some setting but I'm pretty sure they're full of shit.   :oh_i_see:

I think we can all agree the tactical camera is complete shit. I seriously wish I could cobble together all the gameplay videos where they lauded it as a feature. I would guarantee they spent at least 20 minutes combined talking about how great the camera was.

Devs have completely lost touch on shit like that when it comes to UI. I really really wish they would just stop trying to reinvent the wheel. There are reasons a classical UI in an RPG works.

Gameindustry.biz interview with Mark Darrah
 (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-11-03-biowares-inquisition)


Surprisingly candid answer. I wonder how many design decisions can be traced back to that single sentence.  :grin:



Interesting. Blaming this for the elements of wow-ifcation some have noticed probably pushes it. But interesting not the less.



Not the he is technically wrong, a game designed after the whims of the "official forum" game mob would be a monstrosity. But in the case of a Dragon Age Origin sequel a faster horse would have have been exactly what I wanted.

Started playing with a controller last night. A lot of my bad feelings went away. It's just not for k+m, basically. If I can forgive Dark Souls for not being workable with anything but a controller, I guess I can forgive this too.

That's a fucking knob answer I'd expect from a developer. Hur Hur Henry Ford said our customers are really morons, the poor dears.

The people don't know what they want if it's a completely brand new idea, since they've never seen it. People sure as fuck know if they don't like something they've seen or tried. Absolutely nothing they've done in this game is a brand new idea. At all.

I was a bit irked at having to go through the dragon age keep thing instead of importing a save game.  We'll see how it goes once I get home and actually install the game  :awesome_for_real:

Here's hoping that Zevran finally stays dead, instead of wandering about Kirkwall after having previously been mercilessly executed by the Warden.

Delivering a car instead of faster horse is fine, too. The problem is when instead of a car you deliver a wheelbarrow.

"The problem is that people don't really know what they actually want," says the guy whose second entry in the vehicular analogy franchise was an Edsel with cinderblocks for wheels and had a clown in the back seat whose job was to go "ha ha, fuck you!" and slap you in the face every time you pressed the gas pedal

"you all would have just asked for a faster horse."

philistines

FYI:  Since downloading the latest Nvidia driver update, I haven't had that Directx error.  I hope posting this doesn't jinx me.

Ha, no.

100% of PC gamers have a KB+M. Less than 100% of PC gamers have a controller. 100% of PC games are developed by developers developing on KB+M. Shit, most of any PC and console game development process is via KB+M.

Another way to say it:

How many totally awesome video games have come to PC with their only problem being crappy KB+M support?

tl;dr: DA:O and DA2 showed it wasn't hard. Most recently, Shadows of Mordor showed it wasn't hard.

Again, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. Unplayable w/out controllers. I didn't see too many people here or elsewhere saying, "Don't buy, don't play, get your money back" for that sin.

Which is understandable if the game was created for console-only originally and then horribly ported to the PC. That's not the case with DA3.

I'm not sure I care, per se. It's like ye olden debate about MMOs trying to split the difference between PvP and PvE as a basic design paradigm. You get fucked the worst when you try to make everybody happy.

This Sera character is a hoot. Couldn't understand a damn thing she said at first, however.

I suggest people don't just try to 100% Hinterlands right away. You get 2 characters if you advance the plot a smidge.

I found the first area that is completely not fun in the game. The desert area with the shards. The designer of that level deserves to be kicked in the jimmy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonage/comments/2mw0iz/psa_leave_the_fucking_hinterlands/

Definitely by level 5 or 6 you should not have problems doing the first plot mission and yes it opens up a bunch of new stuff including a number of interesting folks you can recruit.  Sera is indeed a riot.  Sadly my character is a rogue and I also really enjoy having Varric around, so I am awash with rogues at the moment.

You actually unlock 4 if you advance the plot a smidge. I got the strat guide so that was one of the first thing I looked up

I think I was.. level 8 or so when I left the Hinterlands, with almost everything completed (three rifts, dragon and some minor map exploring to do), at least side-quest wise. I should have left earlier, but there was stuff to do! That and I'm very paranoid about missing things like character cut-scenes.

Finally got Skyhold unlocked.. and holy shit. Totally overwhelmed me. Spent.. 5 hours? just mucking about there talking to people, running around, talk to more people.. kept unlocking more and more conversations, which meant going around to everyone talkable again.. unlocking more shit, which meant going around again.. is there any kind of gating mechanism for some of these things? Something to get an anal OCD completionist to stop and to go out and kill shit?

Also.. so many war table missions where the ambassador is the best choice (at least time wise? I don't know if there are benefits or penalties for who you send to these things other than the amount of time it will take, so I've always just been going with whomever can do it in the fastest time, as it seems tailored to them). Need more shit where Cullen is the more advantageous. Also overwhelmed at the number of options of where to go. I farted about a bit in the Stormy area for a bit (before getting Skyhold), and haven't even unlocked any other areas and now I got something like four or five seemingly major, important quests.

It's actually a bit refreshing from the standard 'go here, then here.. now here.. and here..' that is so common.

And yeah.. Sera is amusing. Actually, Sera is the love interest of my female qunari mage.. largely because I figured it would be hilarious.

Anyone using Blackwall in their parties? He seems.. dull, and I actually like Cassandra (especially a certain book related quest involving her), and was wondering if it was worth using him as a tank over her for dialogue reasons, for my other playthroughs (I just started an archer to piddle with now and then and am debating whether or not to just stick with Cassandra as the tank again).

The Iron Bull >> everyone else

Mayhem!

Latest update allowed Nvidia to set the graphics settings fixed it. Now everyone has VERY plastic hair though :(

I've been taking Blackwall along whenever there's a Grey Warden-related quest, and picking Cassandra back up for everything else.  The game's grown on me, but it still feels like they could've streamlined the massive amount of resource gathering you need to do.  Also, not being able to reliably heal my characters up between battles is driving me insane.

Hey neat, my voice just suddenly switched on all cutscenes!

Very plastic as in, very shiny? Set the mesh quality in game settings to high or better, that should fix it. It still will be rather fake looking but less like an accident in grease factory.

(unless you mean some update published after the official drivers they had on 18th; I didn't check for any beta drivers, sorry)

Yea, I hope they polish things a bit in the inevitable "fix the PC port" patch to come. The plastic skin is worse to my eyes than the hair. But also the sound thing where the game can only be played in stereo (otherwise you lose the in-dialog character voiceovers) needs to be fixed.


And again, I say Shadows of Mordor.

If you were picking, say, a best selling PC game designed for PC first in an age when it is assumed all PC gamers are using a controller, I'd see your point and happily accept my "get off my lawn" card.

But Dark Souls 1/2 is not that game, and we are not in that age, simply by virtue of most of the rest of the games that get it much more right than not.

I'm accustomed with UI conventions that are console-first. Laborious screens you need to slog through just to manage inventory, dumb modal and contextual conventions that mostly just work at 11 feet away on a screen without a mouse cursor. Been dealing with that since the last generation of consoles. Even Assassins Creed series has handled PC a lot better.

I  :heart: Iron Bull and Varric. You need a humorless character for them to interact with though. Cassandra is pretty good. Iron Bull comments about tit armor with her for example.

What the fuck is this? People play PC games with console controllers?

Do you all hate yourselves?

So, finished Hinterlands completely.  Everything done and explored.

I'm missing two mosaic pieces.

The completionist in me is furious.

The rest of me refuses to comb over that huge area to look for them.

Bah!

Also; dragon fight was fun. Did it at level 11, with my party (Cassandra as tank, Sera as archer and Vivienne as Lightning/Support spec) at level 11. Sera died once because I wasn't fast enough on getting her out of the way of flame breath and she loved to stand right in front of the damn thing, instead of backing off. Honestly, would have walked right through the dragon if my mage hadn't been specced Fire/support, because the damn thing was immune to fire and the only offensive spell I had mapped that wasn't fire was chain lightning. Still, double barrier, a couple regen potions on Cass and myself.. and a few normal heal pots for Sera and Vivienne for when they walked through fire and it was easy, but long.

Also, found some fade touched Obsidian, I think it was obsidian anyways.. god damn. Gonna need more to craft some weapons with. Gives +3 guard on hit. Can easily make your tank invulnerable with that... Even on the dragon Cass only lost her guard a few times.

Yes, all through having fun with Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, I was thinking "Oh, dear, playing with something other than a keyboard and mouse is a religious sin, and God will punish me for it." And so here I am again, forced to sin against the most holy of holies. I wonder what circle of Hell has room for playing a game with something besides a keyboard and mouse. Probably the one for heretics.

Come on now. That's the only example you've got  :oh_i_see:

I'd happily adopt a new interface device once it becomes standard enough the knowledge to support it is a commodity skillset. KB+M is no more intuitive by nature than a piano. Just because you can press keys doesn't mean you can do it well without lots of training and/or conditioning. But, it simply remains the dominant form because we're surrounded by it in our every day lives across a spectrum of need states.

Meanwhile, game controllers are single purpose. And even with that single purpose, there's a reason why every console generation needs to reinvent them to a degree.

We're starting to witness the emergence of post KB+M interfaces. But we're a generation away from seeing a new dominant form, and another generation away from it being the complete replacement for all interface devices for all applications.

In the meantime, design well for the platform your game is on. EA/BW didn't port to PC well. Others have ported fine. This is a choice EA/BW made (or a prioritization they didn't make... anyway, same diff). So they rightly get called out on it.

Yeah, I'm just trying to stay within some sort of proportionality on this and other criticisms. Which, I know, is not the normal thing around here, where the spectrum runs from dyspeptic old-man outrage to jihadi-level fury.

Another apologist to the count. *updates his .txt*

I'll just jump  in to say I got this on the Ps4, and **** me it's good. Ddnt finish DA1, didnt play DA2, utterly loving this and possibly my game of the year.

It's Skyrim with better combat, better graphics, and Bioware's story and character writing. The game is also freaking HUGE in size, and it has to be easily the biggest game they have made since maybe Baldurs Gate 2. Even the small zones go on forever!

Ha!

rf47: What's this about updating a .txt? Joke or are there tweaks?

Everyone should keep a list of txt on people in the internet man.
My cyber-senpais taught me.
One day I made a remark that contradicts what I said much earlier and they pointed out they had a txt on me. :\
From then on I have created a special folder in my computer to hold every .txt on every user I met online.

My wife doesn't understand why she can't play right now. Trying to explain these jackasses to her... unsuccessfully... https://twitter.com/lizardpatrol

Is that why I suddenly can't log into Origin?

Unplugging her lan cable forced offline mode and allowed the game to launch.

Origin works for me.


Ah!

There is always someone somewhere with a big knows who knows who'll trip you up and will laugh when you fall...

I really didn't like this game at first. Many hours in I am thinking this is one of the best games I've ever played, and I still have only just met the antagonist.

Oh and - Jar of Bees. New favorite thing ever. Playing on PS4 with a controller, which means all is right and as the Maker intended. I just really wish I could control the camera distance from my character.(http://i987.photobucket.com/albums/ae359/bootstackhead/Larkin3_zpsedad8596.jpg)

I am enjoying this game so much, after 20 hours of play I started a new character to be a more optimal class for the NPC buddies I want to drag along in my party, something I almost never do (I'm not a re-player of RPGs).  There's so much content that while I'm catching up to where I am in my first game I'm managing to see a lot of entirely different places and quests. 

The combat is a bit wonky, but not so bad as to ruin the overall experience (I stick with Normal and play ranged -- first an archer-rogue, now a lightning-mage, with Cassandra tanking, Varric providing additional DPS, and third party member usually Sera, but other folks get swapped in as appropriate).  Using a mouse and keyboard on the PC because I'm not some kind of apostate or abomination.

Jar of Bees is indeed the best thing ever.

(http://i.imgur.com/RsMQnKO.jpg)

The best part of Jar of Bees is the final upgrade you can get for it. The name and all.

Now that I've seen those screenshots I agree. The faces and hair do look really ridiculous and glossy. It's quite distracting and sad because I quite like the character designs you two posted otherwise.

So, if you skipped DA2, will this one not make as much sense plot wise, or does that not really matter?

Also, is it heavily consolized?  I see people mentioning they play it with a controller on PC, which is something you only really do if it’s a straight console port with no regards to the PC.  Or is it more like Mass Effect 2/3 where its still (mostly) tolorable with M/KB?

Was going to just skip this, but based on people’s reactions here, I might go see if some rum drinking peg legged sailors have a spare copy.

Mass Effect 2 and 3 were consolized and still they were 1000 times better played on a PC. Shooting, mouse, you know. That's another reason why I am annoyed at what I am reading about this. But I picked it up anyway, so we'll see how it goes.

The story still makes sense. Somewhat. It never really tie the whole DA1&2 plot much except for character cameos.
It's heavily consolized. Very badly ported with sub-par control schemes. You can't even click on a loot to automatically move your character over n pick up.
It's not cracked yet.

 :ye_gods:

What is wrong with these people?

Ton of summaries online as to the plot for DA2, Reddit or the Bioware forums I would suggest. As for KB/M - as a melee I found it almost unplayable, but, a number of the issues related to that will likely get patched up.

So, rk47 has been sending me footage of this game as he records it.

I've been skipping the cutscenes in fucking videos. What the shit people. There's no way between the cutscenes and combat controls that this game is worth playing. Or worth praising.

I seriously don't "get" it.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/davechappeldismiss.gif)

42 hours in and I am enjoying it a ton. Finally just got my specialization to Knight Enchanter and it's Arcane Warrior 2.0. So far, I haven't had much trouble going from range caster to melee with the M+KB but I imagine that after so many hours I'm pretty used to the  weirdness of the controls.

Finally figured out why my voice changed - if you customize anyone else you might meet (spoilers I guess), it changes your voice to whatever one you didn't chose.

I have complaints, but overall I am having a lot of fun with it.

Exactly. Game's fun. Eat a dick if you can't see why.

There's legitimate complaints, but seriously it's not going to take away from the overall experience that this fills. There's plenty to do, good characters, a decent enough story, and again plenty to do. And redo. The areas are brilliantly done.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.  I liked Mass Effect 2/3, which were heavily consolized, but I cannot even fathom trying to play those games with a controller.

However, from the sounds of it, they've gone all in and controller is the only way to play.  Unless they somehow turned all the combat into Mordor or Demon Souls style fighting, Fucking bleh.

All I can see is my thread where I said this is the worst season of gaming ever. Can I see this as king of the Short Bus? Sure can. Can I see this as a game worth playing? Not really, no, and you haven't exactly made a compelling argument other than "There's, like, you know, stuff to do, man."

For example: If I need a game to dick around with during Christmas time, should it be this or should I just boot up Skyrim and get a mod to turn everyone into a penis? Is this more compelling than that?

No, playing with a penis is probably much more fun.  Well, for the penis, at least.  I like this game and it's keeping me entertained for now.  Did I like Skyrim better?  I did.  Lots.  But this is good fun for now.

After this, however, I'm going to need a really spectacular horror survival game to play. 

tl;dr it's Skyrim where your moron companion has some buddies and they crack jokes as you go around.

That's plenty of fun for both those who liked Skyrim's exploration and shit, and these who like BioWare's companion antics. If neither holds appeal for you, then yeah. Game doesn't have much/anything interesting to offer.

:Love_Letters:

I've put you in my txt for this.  I'll have to go drinking with you one time.

EDIT
1. Looks great.
2. Controls are 75% on PS4.
3. If you liked DA2 then this is good stuff.
4. If you like collecting shit and squinting at small text, get this game right now.

Basically yes, if you like collecting, exploring, achievements, collecting shit to craft, screwing with crafting combinations, upgrading gear, finding gear, listening to snappy one-liners, riding around large zones, doing quests, finding quests on the way to quests, doing more quests, sending out companions on quests, and leveling your character, then you'll play it.

If you want the best combat do play Dark Souls or Mount and Blade.

If you want the best story, go see a movie and stop trying to pretend games do story well.

I think this might be the best MMORPG to date. Minus to MMO part, of course, but seriously, seems like this has taken lots of notes from MMORPGs and blended lots of the elements we used to play them for into a gigantic single player game. Except for the "online community" part, which has lost its charm a long time ago and everyone does their best to stay away from anyway.

if that's true, does that make KE an absurdly overpowered class?

because Arcane Warrior sure as hell was

The game's grown a lot on me, too.  Once I finally realized that trying to fight in tactical view was causing my 2h warrior to stutter around trying to find a good attack angle instead of just swinging really big sword.  Definitely onboard with a Mage if I play through the game again, though there's so much content that I think I'm going to need a long break before I give it another go.  The variety of zones and amount of content really is impressive, and the writing has picked up significantly post-intro as folks here have said.  I'm onboard with this now.

Passive skills, Schild.  Passive skills!  (The level is still oversimplified, but I understand the reasoning for it.)

Yase, i'm playing one and its pretty amazing, especially if you synergize the cooldown reduction skills which lets you go invincible every 3 seconds.

Forgot a couple things.  Mostly that my wife is tired of me singing the Inquisition song from History of the World.  Also, the fast-travel load times are super short within the same map.  Feels next-gen-y.

Does the theme song remind anyone else of this?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmj25u5mVvg

Impressions based on 28 hrs played.  Playing this on Low settings on my outdated laptop and the game still looks good.  Frustrated the first couple of hours with the controls, I am now comfortable with them.  I do miss DA2's tactics (god I loved micro-managing those!) but my party can take care of itself while I play my rogue.  The story's good enough but good god the exploration and crafting!  I am done with Hinterlands and Storm Coast; I often just run thru the land, grabbing elfroot and heading for the next POI.  Bravo Bioware, this explorer is having a blast.  Also crafting is back and it's fun and involved.  Not able to make runes yet, but have made some pretty sweet items that were better than blue items of the same general level.

I like how you can play this game as an action shooter or pause it and issue orders.  Tactical mode is disappointing.  

Hate that there is no 'loot all' hotkey when I call up a loot window.  I hate that constant mouse clicking.  

I held off on buying this because of the lameness of DA2, now I'm glad I got it.  I do wonder how I'll feel after 90 hours and I'm still killing bears.

Fucking bears.

It didn't make an impression on me.  Standard fantasy horseshit that isn't Elder Scrolls.

Also, as promised: my wife likes it a lot so far, minus the bullshit run speed and overloaded X button nonsense.  She calls it Skyrim Lite, which I find amusing.  Looks like a Western FFXII to me, replacing the Star Wars plot with BIOWARGARRBLE.


I thought the top item in the list was the "loot all" option?

Sounds like its not for me, ta.

Knight-Enchanter specialization is basically the 'I can solo anything' class.

The Rift Mage specialization is basically the 'I can kill you all!' class.

The Necromancy specialization is basically just kind of there.

Personally, I preferred the Rift Mage specialization after I fooled with both for a couple hours before rolling back and sticking with the Rift Mage. However, that was with a Fire specced mage. Knight-Enchanter with a Frost and Lightning spec is.. very good. Unless, of course, it's Vivienne who is the Knight-Enchanter. Companion AI does not mesh well with it -- but the companion AI is pretty bad. Taking the Tactics out was the dumbest decision Bioware made for the game.. and they made a few doozies.

Killed my second dragon.. was a bit disappointed in how easy it was, but then again it never flew around or summoned adds like the one in Hinterlands and Cassandra just tanks the shit out of everything (she never even lost her guard, much less health). Sera still died.. but that's kind of her thing. Also, some of the banter between Vivienne and Sera is hilarious. Takes awhile to get good payoff, but Sera's continuing efforts to get at Vivienne either blowing up in her face or earning little more than a nod, a smile and a "that's nice, dear" attitude makes for some good banter compared to the Cass/Vivienne banter which is far more bland.

Even if Iron Bull is sub-optimal in my setup, he's worth keeping around:

That's good stuff! Speaking of Sera; I have her auto-levelled and she constantly closes to melee, even with a bow equipped.  What's up with that?  She has two bow skills and a bunch of subterfuge, should I give her a dagger?

Auto-level?  :ye_gods:

Don't make her an archer. That's what Varric is for.

I find melee tends to get shat on unless it's a shield warrior with a ton of guard available.  I suppose a dagger rogue, however, would have more de-aggro options available.  Iron Bull is a chore to keep alive (he's just there for the jokes).

I keep as an archer because right now I'd rather only run with one rogue. 

Respeccing is easy anyhow.

I run tank, two mages, and myself as archer.

Melee sucks in this game until they balance it. Which may be never.

Being an Archer myself I immediately made her Dual Dagger. She gets stuff done, for sure. I just hate that a space in my party has to be taken up by a sword-and-board warrior as so far those characters are terribly boring. I guess I could have made Iron Bull into a tank? Is there any way to re-spec your party members?

Can they equip the amulet that you buy from the Haven blacksmith?  That respecs things.  Nothing stopping you then from making him sword and board (bored).

So far 200 dps purple dagger at lvl 8 is the best loot I found.

Yeah, I made her dual-dagger and she tears it up now.  Got a sweet purple 203dps dagger for her, not bad for lvl 9.  She also has that skill that has 100% threat reduction from behind and she attacks Cass's target with impunity.  Those two ladies wear out the big bad while I (archer) and Solas or Dorian clear up the trash.  

fake edit:  I think we have the same dagger rk

At least one of the subterfuge skills she gets if you auto-level her is a melee range ability. So if she has it enabled in the tactics she will use it whenever it's available (the companion AI being stupid and all) and thus automatically go into melee range all the time. If you want to keep her with the bow (which is quite sensible as dagger rogues have it pretty rough) disable it on the abilities page and only use it manually if something comes close enough to punch it in the nuts.

Respec amulets work for everyone. Just buy it and 'equip' it on the character you want to respec.

I might try Sera as a dagger rogue; right now I have her as an archer because non-tank melee tend to get nailed hair with AoE attacks. Might try and craft her some daggers with the +guard on hit, to make her survive.

I am loving this game.  Almost 40 hours invested so far, glad I restarted after 20 due to my too-many-rogues situation.  I love just hiking around exploring the world and questing.  It's a very nice looking world.

Default party lineup is:
PC electricity-centric elven mage
Cassandra sword & board tank
Varric dishing damage with Bianca
Sera dishing more damage with a longbow, or sometimes another character will take her spot.

I  may experiment with Sera as dual-dagger rogue (I also have that 200dps dagger and it looks niiice).  Solid tank + heavy DPS has been working really well for me in minimizing the need to do start-and-stop combat or deal with the tactical camera stuff.  I love the *idea* of the tactical camera -- if they patch in a version that doesn't suck it'd probably entirely change how I play the game.

It was pretty straightforward for dual daggers to get Hook at no cost & cooldown, that way you can just hang back and wait till the target is frozen and shatter it with a dagger special as combo detonator.

Tanks operate differently by pulling their targets to them. They're good at just locking the enemy on themselves while stunning and generating guards.
The reason why I find archer boring is because you don't really need to bother repositioning yourself unless you are directly under attack, even if that happens, hit Cloak and watch the aggro just disappear.

I would recommend archer as the EZ-MODE of this game. There's no much to it and if you get decent gear you can just pour damage into stuff with stealth aggro-drop impunity.

Yep. I switched to 3x archer/1x mage party and just pwn low level shit at Hinterland when I need to grind power for the main quest.
Three archer does around 500x3 damage with full draw spam. You just can't lose any encounter in Hinterlands at lvl 8. And the EXP gain is so little, but since I'm just doing it for Power... it's fine really to go full retard.
The combat during exploration doesn't get any better than this. If shit goes south, one guy can just stealth and fuck off.

Yes, it's hard to lose fights if you have stealth, simply because you can see it going badly and just stealth away. Shit will not follow you.

It's good and bad. Good in explorer fights. Bad when you get to bosses since you have nowhere to go for the most part.

Playing a dual dagger myself, but focusing on the stealth tree because why not. At level six I found a schematic for a Tier 2 dagger when I visited Val Royeaux. Had just enough Tier 2 metal to make two blades. It should be interesting seeing what 216 dps x 2 does to things at level six, though I have a feeling I'll be pulling all the agro off of Casandra, despite reducers.

Oh, and I spent half an hour in Val Royeaux trying to figure out how to get to the upper walkways, including thinking the barrels I found stacked near one were a jumping puzzle. Don't mark doors to areas on the same maps as fast travel points you silly game.

Just got Sera. She's interesting? Decided to crank her up on the poison/trap tree, again because, why not?

Story starts to crank into high gear after you get Skyhold. Just saying. Even so it took me 20 hours to get there because SHINEY THING OVER THERE.

It's pretty OP - perma barrier, invulnerable every 3 seconds which explodes into big damage when you come out of it and you can spam your mystical lightsabre pretty much as much as you want.

I have a keep now, I've gotten so focused on it that I've basically forgotten what the main plot is supposed to be.  If my character could sit in a chair (seriously why is this so fucking hard to include in a game) I'd probably just hang out in the tavern for hours at a time and let the world go to hell.

They really need to include the option to customize your non-combat outfit. Why am I constantly strolling around in beige pajamas, its ridiculous.

And repecced Bull to be my sword and board tank, makes my life much easier now deciding who to bring to the party. (Hint: not Cassandra or Blackwall)

Hint:
Someone important is about to get murdered, you must farm 30 sidequest to access it.

Hey now, come on, I don't think schild is off on this one (not that he needs nor wants defending :awesome_for_real:). I'm enjoying it, but it's wonky as hell. It might have been better if they didn't launch a PC version at all, as maybe a lot of the crap is because of the porting. It's got the stuff I liked from DA2 with a smidge of DA1, but with less polish and more "why the fuck" design decisions (like, the zoning method for Haven, the stupid UI, the retarded looting, production values put to shame by other games launched this year, stuff that even controllers can't justify).

So, good game when there's not much else I'm interested in. But empirically good? I don't see it.

Will Darniaq eat a dick if it's goty?  :awesome_for_real:

Wish I'd been running screen capture when it came time to pass judgement on the Avvar chieftan who "attacks" Skyhold.  That plot bit came at the same time I was getting major graphic glitches; it got pretty surreal.

Ya know, after like 5 whole seconds of google image search, there is literally no image for "dick" that I could spin into something I would actually eat.
 
I leave it to someone with better google-fu.

But I will say, if this is goty by some metric I respect, Ima ragequit gaming.

*holds Darniaq's hand tightly*
Bare your blade. And raise it high. Stand your ground. The dawn will come.

(http://asset.soup.io/asset/1606/4762_1ee8.gif)

 :why_so_serious:

Seriously, have you never heard a spotted dick joke before? How long have you been on the internet?

Edit:  Never mind, I thought enchanting was different from rune crafting.

goty 2014


wouldn't be surprised



because 2014



like, what's honestly going to compete with it?

this?

http://assets2.ignimgs.com/2014/11/13/289650screenshots2014-11-1100007jpg-e14c24.jpg

Apparently Bayonetta 2, Hearthstone, Shadow of Mordor, and Dark Souls 2.


So yeah.

Of the games I've purchased this may be GOTY by default:

Because
Civ:  Beyond Earth was beyond disappointing
Tomb Raider started GREAT but you need a controller really.  TAP THOSE KEYS REALLY FAST! Blearch.
Hearthstone is a terrible game according to f13 internet experts.  Comes in a close second to me.
Endless Legend seemed like it would never end.

Turrible year for games, just turrible.

I liked hearthstone just fine, but it's shallow.
Didn't play the other ones.

Dark Souls 2 is still way better than anything else. But yeah, yeah...

I didn't play a whole lot this year, but I never got into Dark Souls so 2 wasn't even on the list of things to try.   Shadow of Mordor was an awesome proof of concept and it had about 15 hours worth of excellent gaming in it.  The FFXIV reboot is excellent, but I have no idea when that started.  Perhaps 2013, dunno.  

I'm nearly 20 hours into this, enjoying every minute of it (well, except that desert level and its pathing issues) and there's no end in sight.  

I find it hard to gripe about lack of solid, blow-your-mind GOTY candidates when I'm enjoying this so much.  Sure there's been some dry patches this year, but that's what your Steam backlog is for.

I kinda liked the pathing issues in the desert mine. Figured out I could jump down to a ledge to grab something, then switch focus to another character and walk away, the guy who jumped would teleport to me.

Goddamn posting from an iPad sucks. Can't edit quotes for some whatever reason. Anyway, funny gif is funny. That's a keeper. And I don't go on the internet, it comes to me by way of Feedly.  :oh_i_see:

I didn't play enough this year to have a list. Ones I felt were best were Divinity and Shadows. I enjoyed Titanfall but it was shallow. Need to pick up Dark Souls 2, but that does seem like a controller game, so if I'd gotta go get one. Starting a some new schoolin'' in January though so, yea, there goes 2015 for that.

Someone mentioned Tomb Raider, and that would be my #2 behind Shadows, except TR was last year.

Only computer games I've played a significant amount of in 2014 were Civ5, Blood Bowl, and Hex.

Which surprised me when I thought about it.

Oh, and TSW I guess.

My problem with the desert level was just finding the wandering miner a second time. For some reason that was really hard.

Have to say how much I enjoy the levels. BioWare has finally gone past their tired "smallish arenas connected by corridors" design. These are game environments I just love being in. Even if I'm just taking a breather from the story drama and collecting bear asses, I enjoy just taking in the views and wandering into the nooks and crannies.

One thing that I also remember from previous games is that feeling when you're well into a story mission and realize you brought the wrong damn peeps, story wise. Storming that Warden fortress and the subsequent shit that went down, I was wishing I had Solus and Blackwall (for once) in my party. The only thing I got out of Bull and Sera were how freaked out they were. Though... the after mission conversation with Bull was fucking priceless, I don't know if I would have gotten that had I not taken him?

Party banter is broken. It only goes off less than 10% of the time. Bioware is aware of it, but has no fix yet. Makes me want to stop playing the game till they do.

Really?  Because it hasn't bothered me at all so far.  I don't like a lot of yapping anyway, but Bull and Sera have a funny chat.  She's ran Varric clean out of my party.  Tired of his lame ass anyway.

So, it's not Mass Effect 3, but how is multiplayer? Any fun, at all? Maybe with friends (as opposed to random quick joins)?

I've put a lot of time into it, although just playing with random people. Overall when I'm grouped with people who have a mic, they've tended to be decent enough people. Only a small handful of people I just didn't want to play with after finishing a round. In keeping with the theme of bad port though, there is no "push to talk" button for mics. They're just on all the time which can be pretty annoying at times.

Getting the negatives out of the way, there's only three maps with three enemy types, and there's not a lot of randomization. After playing a lot you'll really start to recognize the patterns. The crafting system and unlocking classes isn't particularly intuitive at first. Weapons have an item level listed, but I don't think I've seen anything that's actually restricted by character level. That means once you get some ok weapons the ton of common ones you'll find or get out of chests just get salvaged immediately for crafting materials.

On the plus side, the 3 classes you start out with are some of the most useful ones. Archers are arguably the best single target DPS class, and Keepers have Barrier and some good options for increasing its usefulness as well. Combat for some reason feels better than the single-player game, although I'm still not entirely sure why since most of the abilities and mechanics are just copied over. I'm not sure if it's just that the camera feels better, that the level layout is more suited to combat, or that you aren't transitioning from doing non-combat stuff, but for whatever reason, even playing a one-hander and shield guy feels better to me in multiplayer although I still sometimes have trouble getting in a good position to block.

I've unlocked most of the classes, and found a couple good people I play with from time to time and we've been able to get as far as the last boss on the hardest difficulty (at which point we were fairly quickly demolished). At this point I think I just need to farm the middle difficulty until I can get some better gear. The gold comes at a fairly decent pace. Once you're getting through the easiest difficulty on a consistent basis, which should happen pretty quickly, 2-3 runs should net you a large chest (which will likely be filled with common crap but still...).

Somehow this game is leaving me with a kind of a sad feeling as the combat isn't really that good and I'm not really enjoying the plot that much (nor are the companions and their personalities really shining during the actual gameplay and not just talking to them in the keep). I'm not saying that it's bad but I was hoping for more I guess. Some of the individual scenes do feel "cinematically epic" in a good way but the rest of the writing just doesn't support it. Part of it might be that they felt the need to cram every nook and cranny full of sidequests making it feel bloated at times.
Actually the thing I'd compare it to is the second Hobbit movie; looks great, has some nice scenes but feels drawn out and just doesn't have the writing to make it a really memorable experience.

I gave up. Where the hell is she?

I put this off until the weekend due to peoples responses about the PC controls, but turns out they don't bother me a whole lot. Guess nothing can get worse than Dark Souls with a mouse and keyboard, except maybe FFXI.

I'm only level 9, but this game is just pure fun for me. Very much like how I enjoyed Skyrim. There's too damn much to do and explore. Kind of put off the main story to check out all the other areas you can open up on from the war table, so I'm just now starting the mission where you choose the templars or the mages after close to 28 hours on this character. Games like this I don't mind playing terribly slow in thankfully.

Reports are they should be saying something every 10 minutes. For me it's about once an hour or two.

If they would fix the "click to walk to target" thing, the controls would basically be fixed for me. Without that fix its infuriating and I have to play a ranged character, which isn't really my thing.

Choose the mages!  That mission is awesome.

I am loving the hell out of DA:I.  Yeah, it's a bit wonky in places, the tactical camera is a bummer, etc, but it's just so goddamn fun, there's so much to do, the scenery is so enjoyable to hike through, the party members are fun, etc, etc.  I'm like 50 hours in (counting a restart after 20 when I decided I enjoyed archer-rogue but just had too many rogues in my party).

I killed a dragon yesterday morning and it was pretty epic (45 minute battle, running dry on all consumables, general mayhem, etc, etc, but victorious in the end)...
(spoiler for big 'ol screenshots)
It's worth taking Iron Bull along to a dragon slaying, and then going drinking with him after.  Hilarious.

Good deal, I killed him yesterday myself.  I have a dragon hunting team; well all I do is put Cole in instead of Sera so we have two archers, Dorian and Cassandra to tank.  My ace in the hole was Fire Resistance potions.  I was a little underwhelmed about potions until I saw that you can upgrade them and that's a little collectible mini-game.  Nice. Those dragons are good fights and good loot.  Cass and my archer wear some cool looking gear now.


 

I haven't found non-healing potions yet.  Will have to keep my eyes open.  I love my jar of bees though.

I eventually left the desert and came back and the miner was where she had been the first time. So it might just be that there was something glitchy about her. Though getting the key turned out to be something of an anticlimax.

Speaking of the desert, I love Varric's bitching about "how many keys does this place need?" every time you pick up a shard out there (probably only after you've opened a door with them).

She wanders.  If you just set the quest to active it shows you where she currently is.  Problem is, she can go up to the highest level if she can path her way through some caves.

The Crestwood zone is my favorite so far.  Do yourself a favor and find the dragon after finishing off the quests.  Close fight, but I did the last 3rd while being completely out of potions.  I found out the AI wasn't maximizing the use out of Solas' Fist of the Maker (I may be mixing up the Rift Mage spells).   With a +25% crit staff, that think was hitting for 650+ dmg more than half of the time.

So, how do you get a class specification on your character?  Do you need to talk to the NPC that has it?

There's a war council mission you have to do to get the specialization people to show up at Skyhold, then you pick the one you want and do their fetch quest.

I just killed the level 19 dragon on the storm coast; that makes 5 (out of 10?).  I find spirit damage works well, they've all been vulnerable to it.  The knight-enchanter ability that does 1000 percent damage when you rematerialize inside an enemy is critting for up to 3k on them.

I had trouble keeping Varric and Sera alive.  Eventually I just let them die and cassandra and I finished off the last half of its health with barely a scratch between us.  She's a tanking machine.

I actually did the templar mission as I really wanted to see what the hell was up with the Lord Seeker guy. I'm going to do at least one other play through however, but it won't be for a while, hah.

I'm also surprised by the multiplayer. Played a few rounds with some friends lastnight, but I enjoy it just as much as single player. Wasn't really sure what to expect, but I liked going through the singular missions as normal Inquisition troops. Though it seems getting decent, useful gear is very luck based. It makes me wish there was a co-op experience for the main game though, kind of like Divinity: Original Sin.

If you're having trouble keeping someone alive, just craft them a weapon or piece of armour with fade touched obsidian. The +3 guard on hit is stupid powerful, especially for mages due to attack speed. My current party all has crafted gear and I dropped the +3 guard o hit onto everyone's armour and I went from them getting banged up here and there to no one taking damage ever except on dragons (which went from the occasional death to occasionally needing a potion). Now, I'm playing on normal and am considering upping it to hard just because of this one change. It isn't even remotely balanced how good + guard on hit is.

Game gave some pay-off with my female Qunari romancing Sera though. The sheer.. disappointment in the choice of doing so from some of the other party members was hilarious. Along the lines of 'Sera? Seriously? Are you insane? You have an image as the Inquisitor and you're with Sera!?'. And a couple others more along the lines of 'Sera? Hah! Good luck with that..'

The actual romance isn't that great (but none ever are), but some of the dialogue has been funny.

I'm romancing Cassandra and one scene in it is the funniest moment I've ever had in the Dragon Age games. 


I haven't crafted and +guard stuff but I have strong Fire and Lightning Resist potions that made the fights pretty easy.  That and I was a couple of levels higher than the dragon.  Haven't done Storm Coast one, I got there and I wasn't prepared.

That was my problem--when I was setting her to active, it was showing her to be in a place that she and I couldn't get to. I could actually see where it was supposed to be (nothing above and below it) and she not only wasn't there, I couldn't get there either. I think she wandered off a path and was inside a wall or something. I have seen mobile NPCs inside of things occasionally.

To get your class specializations you need to do a war table mission that unlocks the trainers (think it is called something like Specialization or something close to it, on the war table). I think it requires you to have Skyhaven and level 10. After that, you'll get a brief cut-scene of three people showing up to Skyhaven, and you can talk to them to get a quest for each of the three specializations available to your class. Quests are generally 'get writings detailing the specialization', 'get x number of special item that only drops in certain zones/from certain mobs' and 'craft specialization book', which is just the prior two items and going to a requisition table to 'craft' it. The writings are easiest, as just find whichever follower is that specialization (Solas for Rift Mage, Cass for Templar, etc.) and nearby them (or in Cass' case, the building next to her) there will be some papers or a book you can interact with to get the writings. The x number of ingredients is more annoying, but usually trivial in just having to go out, kill some mobs in certain areas and get one to drop (certain Venatori in Exalted Fields drop a Venatori tome for the Rift Mage spec, as an example).

I found the Artificer tome on the table beside Varric.  You can complete all three quests before choosing a specialization also.

I'd recommend at least taking all three quests. I didn't and after I finished up Rift Mage I still have the exclamation marks on my Skyhold map indicating the other two quests (even though the NPCs aren't even there anymore). It's slightly annoying.

Also, I just found out there's music in this game besides cut-scenes, plot points and taverns on a casual trip to the DA:I official forums and reading a bit of the party banter bug thread. I've never had any music outside of the aforementioned times. Greatly annoyed me. Thankfully I don't have the party banter bug, though (I do get occasional sound clipping issues with dialogue, though).

Music seems pretty rare and location based so you ain't missing all that much. Although what little of it plays is rather nice.

Finished the game (rushed thru near the end so did the end fight at level 16 and it still wasn't a challenge on normal difficulty but not a fan of the combat system so didn't see the appeal on increasing difficulty).

I'd give it a solid 4 out of 5 with the point missing due to poor combat and the story (not really gripping and suffered from bloat). Technically the game was great with nice visuals and sounds and it only crashed twice during my 40 hourish playthru and I didn't come across any game-breaking bugs.  :awesome_for_real:

One advice that might be considered a bit spoilery but I wish I had known before playing:

Wonder how long before we get the "Expand Skyhold" dlc?  There are a lot of extra quarries and logging areas available that don't seem to do anything else.

Is there no 2nd hotbar in this game?
Or do I have to pay $5.00 to unlock more hotbars?
I tried spamming guild chat but no one would answer.
I tried opening GM ticket but there's no response.

Surprisingly this is Amazon's gold box deal today. 25% off ($45) all platforms. Didn't expect a sale so soon since it's been received so well.