Discussion Dragon Age Inquisition at 10 bucks, worth it?

Ah! I forgot another complaint I had about the game!

... You use a pokemon as the MC!

Really, you are a pokemon, because your race/background don't matter anything more than the stat bonus given by your race.

No racism against Qunaris or Elves, no fear of falling in the sky for the dwarves, no nothing, your background is absolutely pointless. Hawke with their single choice of mage/non-mage had a lot more depth (and we know that there wasn't that much depth in what happens to Hawke according to him being a mage or not) in it than the Inquisitor had with 4 race choices.

And well... Literally everyone on the inquisition would be a better leader for it than you, the inquisitor is just a pokemon with no influence and no background whatsover, yet it is chosen as the inquisition's leader for no reason aside from having a magical mark on their hand... It's ridiculous.

Leliana and Cassandra are obviously better leaders than you, but because you're the player, they have to put you in a ruling position, even though you're clearly unfit for it.

And well... What is the great work that the incredible leader of the inquisition does...? Being a scout and making settlements like any groundtroop would, by taking Cassandra with you as well, meaning that the inquisition is suddenly without 2 of its leaders on home, just to let you do groundwork... It's reaaaaally disappointing.

I dunno, I feel like youtube videos and the like would be enough for someone that is in it solely for lore/story...

I don't think playing through that game is worth it just for that... It's like recommending someone a 2000 chapters long story, but warning them that chapters 1000-1500 would be the worst experience they'd ever had while reading a book... I mean, I don't think it's worth it in that case when you can just search for a summary instead.

 

This is soooo true ah!!!!! You know, I even tried writing a fanfic about DAI to see if I could imagine how a completely different character would do as the inquisitor. And then I realized. This person has no qualifications?! Why are these people following his orders?! Like first of all, this story doesn't make sense!! And that's the moment when DAI completely unraveled for me hahaha...

The good writers at Bioware all jumped ship. Either that or EA screwed things up again. Who knows...

Mmm, that's true too. Well for me, if I already played the first 2 games then I would want to experience the third game instead of just watching someone else. That's why I still haven't looked at anything about Witcher 3 yet (my current PC can't handle it... )
But definitely, if someone just wants to check out a fantasy story or game in general and doesn't have any attachment to playing it, it's better to simply watch a lets play. At least then you can skip through all of the long travel and fetch quests...

 

Oh dear... I'd never go that far!!!! >.<

And yeah, 0 qualifications, 0 backing, 0... Everything! You're just a pokemon that punches whatever's in front of you!!!

I think the team that makes DA completely changed already... I don't think anything EA would make could possibly screw the game up that much.

... And judging by what ME Andromeda was... I'd say it's most likely Bioware's fault, not EA's.

*nod nod*

I generally prefer playing it myself, but... Ugh, DAI was just too awful for me, I couldn't see myself recommending it to anyone on any given circumstance.

On the other hand, I lost count of how many playthroughs I made of DAO... >.>

... Ah, btw, did you ever tried turning friendly fire on? It was hilarious, the function was ridiculously buggy. The Chain Lightning Spell hit myself everytime I used it, I was killing myself with it! >.<

Ah, and it is also funny how Pride Demons, which were supposed to be the strongest demons according to DAO's lore, became some sort of stage 1 boss in this game... *shrugs*

*nod nod nod nod nod*

And skip all the ridiculously long leveling process... Ugh, I'm past the age I enjoy mindless grinding, seriously...

 

Bahahaha I never tried the friendly fire on but now I kinda want to I just started playing it on easy, I got so impatient... I kept getting annoyed with how you always need to keep gathering everyone for barrier for damage mitigation. Too much micromanaging of the not fun kind for me

And yeah!!! That pride demon was so disappointing! In DAO the pride demons were incredible badasses. I hated what they did with the enemies in DAI. All of the monsters in DAO and DA2 were so creepy and horrifying, but in DAI they all just became... sanitized. Normal mook mobs that you just smash in the face as you run around stuffing elfroot in your pockets.

 

*nod nod nod*

Friendly fire is... Haa... I like the concept, but if Chain Lightning hits you 100% of the time, there is obviously something wrong with it.
My fix for it was to unlearn the spell as soon as I could.

It's my problem with the lack of strategic positioning.

If I can't properly position my mages/archers, they end up becoming vulnerable targets to the enemy's troops, which makes me need damage mitigation on them.

If I had properly planned encounters like I had on DAO/2, I'd just spam barrier on my warrior, because I wouldn't need to worry about my mage being damaged. And even if they were, the full heal at each battle's end solved that...


I can imagine why you'd play on easy though, battles took soooooooo long on nightmare! It took way too long to level up by doing them!!! >.<


And yeah! Messing with the monsters was a huge bother! The design was a lot better on the first games!!!

Oh oh oh, and did you ever try playing that multiplayer? It is soooooooo boooring! A thousand times worse than ME3's multiplayer! >.<

I can really complain about DAI for hours and hours (I did that actually, many times) nonstop... *sighs*

Makes me kinda lose hope for the series... T.T

 

This sums up Dragon Age: Inquisition. If you still want to play DA then try the previous games like DA: Origins.

 

Tbh DAO had entirely too many cheesy spells. I never really used blood magic because it was too cheesy, the healing penalty was a nuisance, and the bad potion mechanics meant that you were never going to run out of mana anyway. Blood Wound was rather OP. I usually followed Sleep with Horror and Waking Nightmare to plow through an encounter.

To be fair the enemies shouldn't be blindly chasing you until you fight on advantageous ground but I admit DAI handled it poorly.

The only thing DAI's "open world" accomplished was making travel a real nuisance thanks to all the larger maps you had to walk through while nothing of worth happens. Their idea of "open world" was apparently that you had to waste time watching landscapes scroll by. The whole travel time thing in DAI was a nuisance. It might be slightly interesting at first but before long all the time-wasting travel just annoys you.

It's much better on the PC. You're missing out on all the content restoration mods, in case you wanted an explanation for why Oghren just up-and-leaves with you when that would by rights make him casteless (the cutscenes were there in the game) or various other content. In addition to that you might also want the combat fixes (a number of abilities in DAO don't work exactly as they should). Plus there's the Thirst user module which is worth checking out. Honestly it's better than the DAO campaign in terms of branching content, multiple approaches, and general reactivity. Content-wise and in terms of bugs, the PC version is much better. There's no good reason to resign yourself to the console version. And by the way, there are a LOT of bugs in the base DAO game. They might not be game-breaking, but they do wreck a lot of sidequests and the occasional main quest behavior.

I must admit this "roleplay" feels like a crutch to accommodate for bad writing to me. There's no point playing pretend by yourself so that you can imagine your decisions matter more than the game ever gives you credit for. It's well and good to have an imagination but if the entertainment is occurring inside your head and not on the screen then that's no credit to the game, and the need for imagination is often more of a tacit acknowledgement of the game's unresponsive and lackluster qualities. Imagination does not require a game as stimulus at any rate. The romance options honestly generally all rub me the wrong way. Part of it is that I'm not a fan of romance in general, but really the trouble is that DAO's romance is written, well, frankly, by D&D nerds. It's cringy. If you ask Leliana in DAO if her fruit is forbidden, the line comes off as creepy and desperate and the fact that she responds somewhat positively to it as opposed to laughing in your face just feels wrong. (Btw it was very easy to accidentally initiate romances in DAO, particularly Leliana's lesbian romance; apparently if she compliments your character's hair, responding positively means you're now officially in a relationship with her or something. wtf.) When Morrigan invites your character into her tent if you get her her book, the lines also feel wrong. A lot of romance lines might belong in trashy romance novels at best, but feel really wrong if you're watching it play out. DA2's romance was an abomination of course (and the suddenly bisexual predator anders bit really did not help, since they basically retconned his character, and Isabella's, and Merrill's for no reason at all). DAI's romance feels completely wrong when it comes to Sera of course, Iron Bull's romance is unpleasant, but I think they actually made more effort to have less head-cases in DAI unlike the previous games.

Dorian's gayness is just overbearing. They should have fleshed his character out more and given him more dimension than being a homosexual. Personality-wise he's okayish, but the entire backstory kinda rubs me the wrong way. As you say, Dorian's really the Token Gay Man and that's just some SJW trash writing imo. When SJWs do their "diversity" thing it always feels horribly tokenist, one-dimensional, and kinda grating because of the hamfisted social messaging. The annoying thing about SJWs is honestly how they super consistently produce horrible writing and then pat themselves on the back for their messaging and whenever you criticize it for being so bad and hamfisted, they have the nerve to try to deflect all the criticism with asinine accusations that you must be homophobic/bigoted/racist for not liking their SJW agenda instead of owning up to the fact that they just can't write worth a damn and are just leaning heavily on SJW messaging to receive praise from other virtue-signalling SJWs and try to place their work as beyond criticism as a way of making up for their lack of writing skills. The Hugo awards in science fiction have had similar problems when the voting pool got dominated by SJWs, which led to the sad puppies and rabid puppies fiascos who tried to reorient the awards back to "good writing" instead of "social messaging" and promptly got excoriated for it.

Okay, that got carried away a bit, but I'd really prefer if there were more depth to Dorian's circumstances than largely just being a homosexual whose dialogues seem poised to continually remind you how he is a homosexual suffering homosexual plights. The bits about Tevinter, what it's like there, and what it's like to be a mage noble are really underdeveloped, and Dorian's own drives are a bit underdeveloped as well. Really, the mark of a token character tends to be that if you were to put aside/remove/look past their token aspect, they suddenly tend to be very flat as a character, and it's a sure-fire sign you haven't exactly written a complete person.

It was even worse in DA2 if you played a Blood Mage Hawke. Seriously, absolutely no one cared even though the mage-templar conflict and blood magic problem in particular took center stage in the game plot. It was wretched. That said there was some nominal racism in DAI when you were doing that approval-fishing quest with the large and pompous noble gathering, but it was a slight, one-off thing. I suppose it could be the SJW thing again where the writers could not bear to write racism against your character (even though the DA setting was supposed to be a dark fantasy setting with quite a bit of racism), but I'd sooner suspect sheer laziness. After all, DAO had minimal racism too. Ostagar was the one time your warden was judged for being an elf, I think. The SJW stuff does remind me though: DAI's Qunari trans-acceptance thing was straight ridiculous given how in DAO Sten spells out the Qunari stance on trannies in no uncertain terms. It's an absurd retcon and inconsistent lore for SJW reasons. And while we're on the subject of inconsistent Qunari lore, in DAO Sten spells it out very clearly that Sten's personality is just him and not some Qunari cultural attitude, but DA2 immediately proceeded to make all the Qunari act a lot like him. Of course, DA2 was an abomination on every level, really.

Even Josephine and Cullen would make better inquisitors than you. Actually Cullen might make a very good inquisitor, given his background. Your character has literally zero qualification. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. DAI's writing was lazy and terrible. The main plot didn't really make any sense either. The bad guy taunting you and all that dumb stuff. It's more like they were spitballing one dumb idea after another and made a token attempt to string it all together. Not to mention the explanation of how the bad guy got his shiny orb was really dumb too. You'd think people were a lot more intelligent than something that dumb, but no. Reminds me of DA2, where there was literally no plot and just a series of dumb shit that happens one after another.

DA2 did that also. You were a noble lord and the Champion of Kirkwall. You never perform any noble duties. You're just walking around town killing blood mages, the odd templar, some demons, and whatever other nutters crossed your path these 10 minutes. Just bad writing, sheesh. If you put the protagonist in a position of authority, you'd better give him a real way to exercise that authority. DAI was actually much better than DA2 in this regard, but it was still very deplorable how you were still stuck playing errand boy as a supposedly high and mighty figure. And you definitely wanted to do the resource gathering yourself. Putting your forces on it is a waste of time for very marginal returns.

This wouldn't even be a summary. You would directly watch all the story cutscenes/banters/whatever you wanted and see it just the same as anyone who was playing the game. There's no real gameplay to DAI's cutscenes (and there's no real gameplay outside of it either, the walking's dull and the combat is terrible and that's pretty much all the gameplay outside of cutscenes right there) and people have uploaded videos featuring every possible cutscene variation by now. You could just watch all the parts of DAI you considered worth watching and skip the rest and you'd be much better off for it.

 

Sure, there were broken spells in DAO, I never said the game had perfect balance or anything, but that's okay. At least there was plenty of variety and strategic play was rewarded instead of non-existent.

They shouldn't, but that's why you use kiting mechanics and constant skills to draw aggro of the enemies even after they leave their intended positioning. If they start going back, you strike them from a distance and force them to overextend until you're in advantageous ground.

Pretty classic strategy really, it just doesn't work if your enemy literally disappears and the encounter resets if you leave a certain area... *sighs*

*nod nod*

Meh, never played any game with mods and never had any problems with it. Missing out on mods is not missing out anything unless your game is trash (like DAI or Skyrim).

The gameplay does work better on PC though, but the game is good enough on PS3. And I had more expansions on PS3 anyway~

Their romance on the first game wasn't the best for sure, but it wasn't that horrible IMO... Sure, there were cringyworth parts, but nothing that made it seem exaggerated to me... If anything, I feel like triggering romance paths while denying them on every single occasion is the biggest bother. (I remember in one of my runs in which I used a male character, I denied every single romance flag with Lelianna, and picked all flags with Morrigan... At some point my character was confronted because I was two-timing or something... >.>)

Overall, it was a pretty okayish romance IMO.

The subclass specializations never affected the story, it was an intended choice... I mean, you can make Winnie (was that the name of the old lady? I forgot) a blood mage if you want, that is clearly absurd, but the game allows you to because it was not supposed to affect the story anyway.

While I do admit that there were very rare occasions in which racism was shown, it still influenced the game at some points... And well, that's what matters for me... I mean, I don't expect the whole game to treat my character differently because of a race/background choice, it would be waaaay too taxing on the devs... But something from time to time would be nice.

If you're an elf you see a bit of racism at Ostagar, and I think you have one or another different interactions with the elves and Zhatrian.
A dwarf will have different interactions at Orzhammar.
Human Nobles will have different interactions with Howe.
City Elves have different interactions at the Allianage.
Mages have different interactions at Redcliff with Jowan.

This sort of thing, your background has some influence on some part of the game... On DAI your background is limited to the bonus your class offers in your stats.

Yep, anyone would be a better inquisitor. *nod nod*

Hmmmm... I don't think DA2 had no plot... It was more like... You were seeing the story of a single person, not of the whole world or a whole country, or of an special event.

So, it revolved more on personal events than on events that "matter".

This is different. Hawke was in no special position full of duties or anything.

Hawke had a title only, he didn't have any particular duties, he did whatever he wanted... And that's essentially what you did, whatever you wanted.

I mean, Nobles don't have many duties in the first place, working is for the lower classes, nobles can just idle for the most part. So... I think like DA2 did show that pretty well.

You did whatever you wanted however you wanted because there was no thing in particular that you needed to do. Reason why many of the quests involved helping your companions out on what mattered for them, because you had the time to help them, you had nothing better to do anyway, and they matter for you.

On DAI on the other hand, you're the head of an organization, there should be literally no one with more duties than you, but you somehow found time to do basic scouting job.

*nod nod nod*

 

True. Mages really were the easy mode of DAO though. Playing DAO on hard mode is playing DAO without mages or health/mana potions. Anyway I was mostly commenting on DAO and pointing out why I rarely play Blood Mage (too easy).

Kiting is honestly kinda dumb. Still, the leashing isn't very good design either. I definitely made a lot of use of the ability to pull enemies in DAO though, but that was 'cause I liked using traps (small claw traps are overpowered, tbh).

Tsk tsk. You don't even know what you're missing. There's a ton of restored content, fixed bugs, etc. in modded DAO. In case you were wondering btw, you could never finish the ancient elven armor set in DAO unless you had a fanpatch fix it. Just because the game is playable unmodded doesn't mean you aren't much better off for having the mods.

Accidental romance is a problem, yeah. And no, the romance wasn't that horrible. It just wasn't exactly a selling point for me either. And it really did get cringy on occasion.

They made that decision later on, but there actually was a scripted scene where Wynne would report you to the templars if you were a blood mage. Some mods put it back in. Honestly it's better to make your specializations matter. That said in DA2 it got really, really ridiculous. Like, mages were in trouble, especially blood mages, and no one ever comments on your protagonist if you built him as a mage and a blood mage at that. It was really jarring and made the game even more ridiculous.

I honestly wish they designed more levels like they designed ostagar. It was the one time that it felt it mattered who you are and that the world wasn't just on pause for you like it was for the rest of the game.

Yeah, there was a mild bit of racism if you were playing a city elf. Originally the Dalish Elf origin was supposed to come from the elves camp you visit in the main campaign (if you ask tamlen in the dalish elf origin enough questions he mentions "master varathorn", an accidental holdover).

True, I just wish DAO did a better job of it. Definitely true that in DAI it really doesn't matter. I think the biggest difference among races was that female elves could romance Solas.

Well, there was no sense of a cohesive narrative honestly. The plot was threadbare at best. A lot of stuff did happen, but it didn't really feel like it had any relation to each other at all. I understand they were going for a more personal narrative, but it was done really badly and I still think it's a bit rich to describe DA2 as having a "plot".

It wasn't an empty title though. The whole deep roads quest in Kirkwall was to restore your noble house to power and make you into enough of a political force to protect your family and its mage (you or your sister) from the templars (who were really, really strong in Kirkwall) and you were leading your house, making you its lord/whatever-the-title-was (which also got a bit silly when you're the noble lord of House Amell and yet you always go by the last name of Hawke; it feels pretty darn inappropriate). Nobles definitely had power and duties of their own, especially you after you rebuilt the family. Hawke in particular was meant to be a very powerful and influential noble and he is in fact recognized as such on a number of occasions. It's just that you never saw any of that political power or noble's duties because DA2 was really silly, rushed, and generally half-assed that way. But they definitely mentioned that you had responsibilities and authority and such. You just never really made use of that because Bioware is bad at being a noble or something. That's why they threw in the scenes where you pass judgment in DAI, so you felt like an authority.

All the dragon age games had trouble like that. In DAO though it did make sense that you didn't have a lot of power to boss people around (you have a small ragtag crew, minimal experience, and no money as the ragtag crew), but you could spend your time doing all kinds of menial sidequesting tasks while there was a darkspawn war going (no worry though, the darkspawn helpfully wait for you to finish all your stuff before attacking). I think BioWare is just generally bad at handling player character responsibilities. They always have that adventurer-style design and they have a hard time providing other solutions even if they'd make more sense or letting matters develop on their own if you're wasting your time faffing about. It was a real failure of those games. The whole world is just on pause and waiting for you to adventure your way into solving everything, even in DAO. I think it's the D&D disease, where the GM makes a setting but never really bothers to think past what the players are doing at that moment or how to solve problems in a non-adventuring way.

 

*nod nod*

Yeah, there were some bad design choices on it, but... Well, kiting has been a thing in games for as long as I remember, so it's not a weird system to me.

Well, I can understand it, but I rarely play anything on PC anyway, so... Meh.

Usually speaking I only play emulators or touhou on PC.

*nod nod*

Oh, I didn't know that... But well, while I can see it as a nice extra flavor to make them matter, they opted for a choice of not making them matter at all... Not necessarily the best choice I guess, but since they made that since DAO and kept it consistent on all games, I don't think it is a problem.

On the other hand, race/class should matter some... I remember a few comments (rare, I admit) from Fenris and Meredith about you being a mage... Barely made any change (if any) on the game itself, but at least changed a bit of dialogue... Better than the nothing that exists in DAI I guess.

If specializations did matter on DAO though (like if that scene with Wynne was kept), it would be pretty absurd to allow Hawke to be a blood mage without any significant story implication though.

*nod nod nod*

Lol! Those things are hilarious~

Agreed, it would be nicer if DAO made more use of it (just like how DA2 could have used your class more), but at least they used some! >.<

Hmmmm... Yeah, few things had relation with one another indeed, a bit sad...

Well, on their defense, the game was probably rushed, considering the game was released 2 years after DAO, which was probably made with no sequel in mind... And well, all the stuff with reused maps that was very blatant... >.>

It was a... Fun game? Well, it was for me at least, but kinda lacking on a lot of aspects, it just screamed "rushed" to me though, so I overlook most of the bad points of the game, even if I don't deny them.

Hmmmmmm... I think it's a bit different? I mean, it's definitely not an empty title, I just don't think it comes with everything you're atributing to it.

I mean, nobles have power? Definitely.
Nobles have responsibilities? Uhn... Maybe? I'd bet on not.
Nobles have influence? Absolutely.

So, I feel like Hawke could have a lot of power and influence without really having any real responsibility aside from managing his own estate, because well, what are nobles supposed to do anyway? Unless they're direct counselers of the viscount, they shouldn't have any obligation to participate in any sort of political matters... Unless they want to that is.

I do agree that it didn't show any of the political power of Hawke on the whole game, which is... Kinda weird, but I think that duties/responsibilities are not something that nobles usually have, so Hawke have more than enough free time.

And yeah, Bioware is absolutely terrible at depicting the player in a position of power, they're better of making the story of people that directly interfere over people that have to seat back and deal with bureocracies.

... Oh, and I agree, Hawke being always referred to as "Hawke" even after you restore the power of house Amell is really silly.

*nod nod*

Yeah, the world pausing for you is kinda weird and not well done at all... Would be a lot more interesting if after each main quest you made, something changed in all other locations to make you see that the world is moving on its own.

On the other hand, I think it would be a bad design choice to "punish" the player for choosing to do side quests... I mean, they're optional and all, they're supposed to be an extra if the player wants to do something else aside from saving the world, they shouldn't have a direct impact on the world's movement.

But yeah, they're bad at handling characters with responsibilities... Which is why I think that making you the Inquisitor was an absolutely horrible idea... *sighs*

The adventurer-style design isn't bad I think, it's a design choice (though exploring other designs wouldn't hurt) that works well... They just need to make sure that the choice of design fits with the setting they provided.

If they put you in a position of power, adventure of going wherever you want whenever you want is not exactly what I would call a wise choice.

 

I bought both Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age Inquisition (not any dlcs though), and tbh not worth, especially not DA2.

Also Dragon Age Inquisition isn't even playable without tons of mods and looking up guides on how to create characters because while the character creator is extensive and allow for a lot of customization, they all just look ugly as hell. A serious turn-off for me at least.

Also the AI is terrible for your companions, I really don't understand how they can manage to make it worse than it was in Dragon Age Origins (Which is 9 or 10 years old by now...), Dragon Age Origin's AI system (where you could customize orders and such) was a bit lacking, but could be improved with mods, but DA2 and DAI don't got nothing.

Basically enjoy your time playing on easy difficulties or having to constantly pause the game to stop your dumb companions from running into melee and dying even though they're archers or mages... (For the record I play on the second highest difficulty and don't actually have a problem, because the whole thing is pretty bugged. I cheesed the first dragon in the highlands to death on the hardest difficulty by abusing how if you stand far away enough your party will revive even in combat, of course this took like half an hour and was what made me to finally decide to lower the difficulty...)


That said the gameplay isn't too bad, and I had some fun after I got a ton of mods, but really it's basically like playing an action mmo (e.g.tera online) but you're playing on your own and have to babysit 3 braindead morons...

Also, my advice if you get it and play it, don't play on the hardest difficulty, it's pretty much the same as the second hardest, but all enemies got like 10 times more health so it take forever to slowly whack them to death...

Even killing harmless animals took forever, I was seriously whacking on some yak or buffalo thinking for 15 minutes before it died even though I was higher level and crafted gear that was better than anything I could've gotten at the time... And this was a harmless neutral NPC type animal that won't really fight back...

Oh right, also, killing enemies reward very little EXP, basically only way to level is to run around and do all the quests.

Edit: Saw some DAO discussion stuff, thought to chime in a bit...

You definitely want mods for DAO as well, but it isn't absolutely necessary if you just want to play through it once (meanwhile thousands of people couldn't even start Dragon Age Inquisition until much later because of the requirement of 4 CPUs, and even then the character creator turned me off so much that I had to look up several mods before even getting past the tutorial...) , but as someone who replayed it 10+ times mods make it a lot better. Especially quality of life and bug fixes.

Also, if you play the game with more than 2 CPUs enabled it's prone to crashing, so I had to make a shortcut to automatically disable all but the first two cores while I'm playing DAO. And the game was 32 bit and only support 2gb ram, which it tend to get over quite frequently, especially with spells like mana clash and that dispell one etc. Which again make the game prone to crashing... So I had to get some program that changed the .exe file to 64 bit and 4gb. Ever since the game has pretty much never crashed.

That already existed in the first game, Dragon Age Origins, that isn't (or at least shouldn't) be part of the SJW complaints.

 

Dunno, I made some... 8? 10? Dunno, I lost count of how many playthroughs I made on DAO, and it was totally worth it without a single mod.

The tactics system of that game was definitely the best I have seen in Bioware, and better than most other games in which you play in real time with more than one character too... I have no idea why they made the system so absolutely horrible in DA2 and DAI, it was great back then.

... The game never crashed for me btw, and my pc was pretty potatoish.

 

UNDERSTATEMENT. It was hideous. That was an extreme rush job. BioWare is used to taking multiple years making a single game and that one was rushed out in a single year. There were blatant cut corners everywhere. Remember the missing year of servitude once your character enters Kirkwall? Of all the things DA2 really should not have tried to redo the graphics into something uglier. That effort would've been better spent developing the levels.

Well in DA2 they did a terrible job of portraying nobles with responsibilities but any setting that features nobles tends to give them some kind of responsibilities, at least if they are executing a noble office and not sitting on a noble title without either lands or court appointments. In that case they don't have much responsibility, but they might still wield political influence. In Hawke's case though he was definitely restoring a major house to glory, it's just that the rushjob meant so much was handled offscreen that the whole noble aspect of DA2 (and as we established, Bioware is already bad at non-adventuring things) became ridiculously nominal. But in Kirkwall the nobles are basically the counterbalancing faction to the templars when the Viscount kicks it and are ruling the place through a system of self-governance.

That's really not how nobility works. It's a power that comes with political authority and that political authority by and large demands regular exercise to be retained and the shape of that exercise comes through responsibilities. If you become an unnecessary and unimportant existence in the political process your authority, influence, and power is likewise negligible (unless you possess sufficiently powerful holdings), and any society with nobles tends not to be fond of having freeloading nobles collecting benefits and doing nothing as they are a drain on the crown (or whatever ruling body) who would be more than happy to increase its personal power at the expense of the nobility. That's not to say there aren't a ton of petty and spoiled nobles who are likely more concerned about their personal stature and political machinations than the lives of those beneath them, whom they might possess a phenomenal power and tendency to lord over, but nobles do have responsibilities, unless they're at least 3rd sons and such, who are basically not expected to inherit anything and are thus given a noble's upbringing without any of the associated responsibilities. They're still expected to make something out of themselves, but they're distinctly more likely to be hedonistic lazy bastards with no real goal or future in sight, esp. once you start reaching 5th sons, at which point the child is most likely neglected by his parents. At any rate, it's pretty pointless to theorize about the state of Kirkwall's nobility, considering how generally half-assed and badly written DA2 is. I'm just saying that the idea of nobles as rich idiots with fancy titles and no day job seems really wrong to me. Even in DA2 the nobles were a strong political force with real power and authority. You just never really saw that in action (despite being one of the most powerful nobles) because the writing and game was terrible like that.

If it were me I would have you balance risk vs opportunities and maybe give you options to "rush" to the sidequest faster or slow down the advancing horde (both at a cost, of course). I think that would make it a lot more interesting.

DOA was worse in some regards. You didn't have a lot of men to be responsible for (until you managed to recruit an army anyway) but you were nominally under serious time pressure to outrace the darkspawn who had already broken through Ferelden's southern fortifications once you're on the main quest. It's just so wrong to create that kind of urgent narrative and then have the warden dick around doing who knows what for who knows how long (I think canonically you spend over a year rallying everyone together while the darkspawn sit on their asses and sack lothering offscreen). That reminds me, Lothering's destruction was so cheap. You just discover that lothering is gone now, and you can't go back. Woops. Not even a cutscene of its destruction. That was all the effort DAO put in when it came to the advancing darkspawn threat.

Agreed.

Interesting thing about the multi-core issue. Don't think I ever had that problem myself. DAO does have memory leaks though (ie. the programmers were bad and didn't properly clean up all the data they weren't using, so the game will slowly take up more and more memory) although it's usually manageable. Casting Mana Clash and dispels won't suddenly eat up RAM though. That sounds like another issue.

And that patch doesn't make it 64bit. There's no patch to do that since it would mean you're rewriting practically every cpu instruction with 64 bit instructions and, as such, basically rewriting the whole software. You won't really accomplish that without recompiling (and rewriting) the game's source code to produce 64bit software. What's really the case is that 4GB is the limit of memory a 32-bit application can use* while 2GB is the default limit of what a program will be allowed to use a 32bit system, unless you change the software's setting. So you change the setting and it gets access to 4GB.

*Well, technically using Physical Address Extension you can access more than 4GB in 32-bit, but you'd have to be running some server edition of 32-bit windows and the program would have to be written to make use of that which is basically not happening. Really, PAE works kinda similar to how MS-DOS would have 20 bits of addressing space despite being a 16bit system.

If you want to know the explanation, basically in binary every digit is a zero or one and a lot of pointers (numbers representing memory addresses) use the last and biggest digit as an on-off switch instead that says "this number is positive or negative" (this is called a signed integer) and a lot of dumb code has signed pointer integers (even though negative memory addresses don't exist) because people use signed integers habitually, so some code even checks for this and gives errors if it finds a negative value pointer. Once you start wanting to use that last digit as an actual digit instead of the positive/negative switch, you need unsigned pointers (which can reference twice as many numbers thanks to the extra digit). Every so often there is pointer arithmetic (adding or subtracting pointers), which gets develops funny problems if the software reads pointers as being signed (and so a memory address above 2GB is suddenly negative and hell breaks loose) and throws errors for "negative pointer values" (even some of the Windows operating system code has signed pointer problems), so just to be safe Windows won't let your software use more than 2GB of memory (that way your memory addresses stay inside the positive values, signed integer or not) unless the exe file has the LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag set on which says "I know what I'm doing and I made sure it's safe to use more than 2GB memory, now let me use the full 4GB" at which point your program can use 4GB of RAM that way (well, less if you're on a 32bit version of Windows in which case you'll also have to change the OS settings to make better use of LAA which is what I did back when I was using 32bit Windows Xp, but for the past how many years all the new computers are 64bit with 64bit versions of Windows). The software you're using just edits the exe to flag it as LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE (you can do it with a hex editor too, it's only changing 1 byte) and it works because I'm guessing no one was silly enough to write signed pointer code in the game and the LAA flag was just on for safety's sake (no one's mentioned having any problems playing DAO with LAA as far as I've heard, and I don't recall any problems either, but if having LAA on does cause crashes and other funny problems, you know the reason now). I think the original World of Warcraft and Fallout 4 also needed to have the LAA flag turned on for the bigger memory limit if you had enough mods/whatever installed. There are a few simple programs that let you turn the LAA flag on on any 32bit program (for example, try this one), which is usually safe. If you only have 4GB of RAM on your system though it's all fairly pointless since your computer will be hogging too much memory for you to be able to spare that much memory for your program unless you feel like tweaking your system's memory usage. But if you're playing games I assume your PC has at least 8GB of RAM, so you might as well activate it on any 32bit games you have.

It's definitely part of the SJW complaints. Hamfisted token homos are a major SJW thing. In DAI they were basically token homosexuals, while in DAO they had actual backstory and personality beyond the gayness (well, they were both bi). There was some definite SJW drift going on there, since it's basically only SJWs who see no problem with hamfisted token homosexuals. If we're going down the LGBT topic, then the qunari trans-acceptance thing went SJW too. In DAO Sten makes it clear in no uncertain terms that the Qun is a firm believer in gender roles and does not support transgenderism. In DA2 Tallis is a female qunari fighter/assassin (the very thing Sten finds perplexing about Leliana in DAO) and in DAI the bull comes up with bs about qun trans-acceptance (when in DAO sten asserts that women cannot be men). It's weird because they're ruining existing lore and I feel like after DAO everyone just... missed the memo that this was supposed to be a dark fantasy setting where not everyone gets along and that the qunari outlook on a person's role in life was supposed to be somewhat stifling. It's part of how the qunari are so different from the people of Thedas. That got messed with just to better support SJW values though, and that kind of unnecessary lore contradiction and poor writing just for the sake of being a SJW is part of why we have SJW complaints. You get the sense that when something goes SJW the quality will just nosedive because they're playing by different standards now that only SJWs will appreciate (because loudly inserting your personal values is now a good thing instead of bad writing) while gamers just care if it's a good game and tend not to enjoy hamfisted one-dimensional writing. It's just not fun.

Incidentally, there's an advanced tactics mod for DAO which is a major upgrade to your AI tactics options. It was pretty much considered a must-have mod until the even more advanced tactics mod came out anyway, unless you're like me and prefer to just order everyone around yourself instead of using any AI.

 

I think you're overestimating what nobles are supposed to do...

Hawke is in a weird point, because he is a noble and owns an estate, but as far as we know he owns no land, and so has no people under him, so his source of income comes mainly from the mine with the High Dragon and the money he got from the expedition I guess.

Still, he doesn't really cost the estate, it's not like he gains an allowance or anything. It's more like... What would he do anyway? The viscount is the one that has the authority on the land and he is the one that takes the final decisions, Hawke has no say in that. He can use his influence to force the viscount to do things that benefit him, but by no means does he have any responsibility towards excercing his political power.

Working is the job of the lower classes, not of the nobles, nobles just take the food the farmers on their territory gathered and use it to fill their bellies, as well as collect tax to make their parties and embelish their castle or what not...

They need to manage their fief, not the viscount's.





As for the advanced tactics, I didn't bother with checking it, but I could clear the game on the hardest difficulty by playing only with my character without giving a single order to my allies (save for some rare revive or movement, though those were pretty rare... Ah, and drinking a Mana Potion, that was a bit more common.).

Tactics on DAO worked perfectly fine if you bothered with customizing them a bit, there is definitely no need for mods.

... I don't think there is any problem in using mods, but saying that a mod is a "must-have" for any game that isn't as trashy as skyrim is pretty ridiculous IMO.

 

Oh, yes. When I said that gays weren't the problem, I meant that as in 'diversity' per se wasn't the actual problem with DAI. (It was just fine in DAO.)

What I meant was that the complaints aren't about gay characters existing, it was how they went about it.

Perhaps I should've elaborated more on that earlier, but well now you already did it, and like you said it was hamfisted and imo pretty much all the dialogue was cringeworthy and I really don't care about the story of DAI actually.

DAI has very few merits other than the gameplay, and tbh it's not like you need to play DAI for some 3rd person RPG action either, so besides for those who want to play the sequels of DAO I would recommend not to buy DAI or DA2.

Besides the stories in DAO and DA2 don't really matter anyway... You can get Alistair to show up in DA2, and in DAI when you accompany Hawke he/she can have 3 different personalities and the 3rd person is either Alistair, Loghain, or some rando dude... and that's pretty much it tbh. (Oh right, I guess the ending of Leiliana...)

And besides the Keep thing make all my saves completely useless anyway. Just take some char and then change all the events you want and done. (And tbh most of the flags don't even matter in the first place either...)

I mean, it depends... Heals and especially healing potions pretty much make DAO's difficulty trivial.

Mods being necessary wasn't really about the difficulty of the game, but quality of life. For example auto-loot, tons of ability bug-fixes, and a lot of toggle abilities automatically turn off at the end of combat and go into cooldown so you have to wait and recast them...

If someone died you have to recast all auras (e.g. haste) for it to apply to them. A lot of annoying things pretty much that's just a lot of waste of time.

Oh and for the record, I had to figure out how to use some program to increase inventory space as 120 or whatever it was (if you buy all the extra bag space) was way too little...

 

I agree with the part of DAO/DA2 not mattering, and I'm sure DAI won't matter either for the next installment.

They wanted to make something nice in which the choices of the previous game affected the next one, but they realize this allienates the new players and gives too much work for the devs, so they decided to go with the route of "Nothing you do will ever matter! \(^^)/"...

Which is well... Plain annoying, I'd much rather have them do something like Neptune, that has a Good, a Bad and a True ending, this way you can not bother with giving the players an illusion that their choices actually matter.

 

Hawke's noble status (ie. estates, responsibilities, privileges, and authorities) were all horribly underdeveloped in DA2 to the point that we have little to no clue about these things, but it was indicated rather strongly that Hawke was one of the more powerful nobles in Kirkwall.

Um, no. Nobles were never a 100% freeloader caste. It's certainly true that a noble's best interests was frequently not the same as the best interests of their peasants, and that they had excessive benefits and powers and license to abuse them, but nobles did have duties. In absence of the viscount, in DA2 I think it was suggested that his authority was partially usurped by the templars and partially devolved to the nobles.

It's definitely true that Skyrim is downright unplayable without mods, but iirc the console version of Dragon Age is a lot easier than the PC version, even on the hardest difficulty, because they redesigned the encounters for consoles. Also the tactics mods give you a much better selection of tactics rules, and I always felt the default options were too limited if you wanted your party to be really clever. That said, there really are a massive amount of bugs and broken content in DAO's questlines and Qwinn's colossal patch goes a long way to fix the problems and make it a better game. There are also a large number of bugs in DAO combat abilities. Dual Striking infamously misses 33% of all the attacks you do with it due to an animation bug they never fixed. Several other abilities simply don't do what they should. The Assassin's Lacerate talent never works in an unmodded game. Haste actually slows down archers. The Healing Received property didn't work. Shale's Rock Barrage does not work unless you do weird things like enter the inventory while shale is performing the rock barrage and exiting it. Arrow of Slaying is also messed up and doesn't work like it should.

I really wouldn't call the gameplay of DAI a merit either. I think the multiplayer was DAI at its most playable because everyone controlled a single character instead of the terrible party-based combat where your party is on autopilot, and DAI's multiplayer is a very repetitive and underdeveloped grind, complete with lootboxes you can pay real money for because EA is a soulless money-grubbing viper like that.

Only too true. In DAI as well you can elect your choice of divine only to discover that no matter who you elect and what policies they follow there will be a templar order and a circle of mages. Actions having nonsequences is a really common and annoying theme in the dragon age series. It's all lip service. Dragon Age's development seems to be driven by a deep-seated terror of branching content and compulsive need to make everything the same. It's like ME3's "choose the color of your ending" abomination, except now you get to choose the color some idiot will wear in the sequel.

They really do. They also make the constitution and willpower stats trivial, and all the ranks of potions are on separate 5 second cooldowns so you can just chug multiple ranks of potion in sequence. It gets even sillier for mages because your magic stat actually improves the recovery you get from potions. There's really no point in ever putting a mage's stat points in anything other than magic due to the design failure caused by overpowered, easily available potions. Non-mages at least have to worry about stamina until Awakening adds stamina potions (why they weren't available in DAO is strange, because deep mushrooms were obviously intended to be a stamina potion ingredient), but even they can freely spam health potions.

There are difficulty mods for DAO too, but a lot of it is about bugfixing and quality of life, yes.

 

Never said they were, I said they manage their turf, not the turf of others.

Yes, console version is a lot easier, it's essentially making the game one difficulty level easier. (like, Console's nightmare is about as hard as PC's Hard)

I wouldn't call Constitution Trivial, it's what makes your warrior survive a Dragon Biting them to death.

Stamina Potions probably weren't available because... Well, they don't seem to fit very well lore-wise.

I mean, A health Potion heals injuries, that makes sense with healing spells being basic spells and all.
Mana potions heal Mana, fits perfectly well with what Lyrium does.
Stamina... Eh? The first Stamina Regen Spell lasts a small amount of time, and regenerates Stamina over time, so... I think their idea was that it was not as easy to make Stamina recover lore-wise.

They probably decided to ignore that and just make a Stamina Drought on Awakening because players asked I'd guess.

Hmmmmmmmm... I do understand what you're saying about Willpower being mostly useless though, but it's always fun to try playing without potions IMO~
Makes Willpower suddenly become quite a nice stat! \(^^)/

 

For What it's woth, it's still worst than Dragon Age Origins, but it's still better than Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect Andromeda, but i thing you'r gonna stop playing halfway.

 

Well, been revisiting DAO a bit recently, so I felt like necroing the thread.

Sometimes they managed the turf of others also.

Heals and armor also do that.

The Deep Mushrooms were a very clear stamina potion ingredient though.

The stamina recovery spells are actually rather good imo. Rejuv and Mass Rejuv both stack and keep the party going. Other than that there's also the Bard's Song of Valor (which gives an anemic bonus to stamina regeneration, honestly) and Shale's Stoneheart and Stone Aura trees (both of which give noticeable and useful bonuses to stamina regen).

There are some fringe benefits for Willpower for Warriors, since it also scales up the damage of the Templar's Holy Smite and the Spirit Warrior's Fade Burst. It also boosts the damage of the Berserker's Final Blow, since it empties out your entire stamina pool and adds damage equal to half the stamina expended. That's about it.

Aye that honestly just about sums it up. Halfway might be a bit generous though. I got bored to death much sooner than that. If you're interested in DAI, I'd just recommend watching it on youtube and saving yourself from the mindnumbing gameplay.