melmer

Nobody expects the Dragon Age Inquisition

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I should mention after my complaining about controls that I managed to have a decent amount of fun using the controller to play with a couple of friends last night for a few hours. There's a good challenge there, and you generally get enough for a small chest after each decent run. The starting equipment you get is absolutely horrible though, getting a single axe upgrade for my dwarf made his DPS almost double.

 

I spent this morning reconstructing my DA:O play through on the website, I didn't play DA2 so I just left the decisions pretty much default. I wonder how much of it will show up in game.

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For those of you who play in action-mode, can you give me an idea of what types of decisions you are making? Do you pretty much stick with your character and not think about what the rest of your party is doing?

I'm playing as a two-handed weapon character.

I should mention that I haven't played much Diablo or Torchlight or MMO's where you use the abilities of a single character and then wait for the cool-down. Do look for back-stab opportunities? I imagine that you look for area-of-effect opportunities. Or do you play it like Golden Axe: Beast Rider where you are dodging attacks and trying to hit multiple enemies with your swings.

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Ech, PC controls suck, really bad. They make this into an action game, but then don't even allow you to strafe at all with the controller. Switching over to the keyboard there's no way to turn on permanent mouse look, so unless you want to play holding the right button down the entire time, you don't get that either. Also, you can strafe, but you turn sideways when doing it making shields mostly useless. : (

 

I'm finding the controls tough as well. I really hated DA2 and I suppose I thought this would be DA:O all over again, and it's... weird so far. I don't like it. Tactical view, with which I had buckets of fun first time around, doesn't feel right. I also want to move by right clicking more. Eh, just started the game, maybe I'm figuring out the kinks.

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On the PC do you hold down a button to advance time in tactical-mode? Or do hold down a button to pause time?

On the 360 you hold down a button to advance time and I can't imagine why they thought it would be a good idea to switch it like that.

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On the PC pause is a toggle.

 

Edit: When using mouse & keyboard, that is. When using a gamepad it's hold RT to advance time, as with consoles.

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Sorry for bashing the game so much. I'm going to find the way to enjoy it.

I'm having a great time with my wife as she plays the game and I watch. The graphical bugs are hilarious as we joke about how we got the shitty version on the game. These are by far the worst looking beards I have ever seen in a game. One guy looks like he was trying to eat magic-marker in his sleep and then the next guy looked like he cut a beard out of a black trash-bag and is wearing it around town (which is a pretty interesting narrative in its own right).

Then she was talking with someone and NPC's would run past in the background at 100x their regular speed.

The texture pop-in is so noticeable that I my wife pointed it out (she plays games a good amount and has never noticed graphical issues) and I got to tell her what the name for it is. We are having a good time.

I mean, we play this series because we love romancing NPC's and political narratives. I assume that we'll still get that part out of this.

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Just spent an hour playing multiplayer, and due to frequent connection problems (on all players' parts) and the occasional lock-up, I have yet to actually finish a mission.

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I have been seeing some of the strange performance issues that people have noted here (texture pop in, hair clipping through clothes, people dropping from the sky after a load). But I'm mostly having a hard time shaking the feeling that this is one of the first games Bioware made after making an MMO. I've actually been enjoying wandering the hinterlands and completing side-quests, but so many of them amount to "go to this place and loot this body to find a letter that explained what happened." It really feels like MMO-inspired quest design. 

 

That isn't to condemn the game as a whole. I'll reserve judgment until I play more of the main story missions, but a lot of the side stuff feels pretty thin narratively, which is kind of a shame. 

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I played an hour and a half of the single player last night. I'm glad someone else ran into the plastic/Vaseline hair problem, as I had the same thing happen and would have just lived with it had I not learned the fix from this thread. Even with that fix, the hair on my Qunari looks really goofy, with light blond corn rows but much darker brownish eyebrows and rest of the hair. I also managed to mess with her face enough to make it look like she's always worried and/or constipated even though it looked fine in the character creator. Oh, and I had to do the creation process 4 separate times because I missed the male/female option, missed the customize option on the face, and hit A to accept the default name instead of X to change it.

 

Besides all that, had a lot of fun, liked the characters so far, looking forward to playing more tonight.

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I have been seeing some of the strange performance issues that people have noted here (texture pop in, hair clipping through clothes, people dropping from the sky after a load). But I'm mostly having a hard time shaking the feeling that this is one of the first games Bioware made after making an MMO. I've actually been enjoying wandering the hinterlands and completing side-quests, but so many of them amount to "go to this place and loot this body to find a letter that explained what happened." It really feels like MMO-inspired quest design. 

 

That isn't to condemn the game as a whole. I'll reserve judgment until I play more of the main story missions, but a lot of the side stuff feels pretty thin narratively, which is kind of a shame. 

 

Yeah some reviews mentioned that. It has apparently strayed from older Bioware quest design where they tended to have a real story behind them with a theme that relates to the lore in an interesting way, then give the player a chance to leave their mark or otherwise take a stance on something in a personal way. I guess it should be expected to have a lot more MMO style quests given the game is supposed to be so huge with a lot of areas, but it raises the question does the game really need to be this big in the first place? Is it valuable to have a 80+ hour game if it is padded out with filler collection/fetch quests? It's one of those back of the box features to say "100 hours gameplay" and "open world with lots of quests" but there's never the checkbox for "quests that are actually good." As long as there are some good quests I could skip the bad ones and hopefully not compromise my party members.

 

It's something that has me skeptical about Witcher 3. Witcher 2 was clever about its quest design - one quest even openly parodied collection quests - but Witcher 2 wasn't a massive open world RPG.

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I do find some of the quests to be just filler. No, I'm not going to collect 5 shards of mystery. I will however go help this random elf find her husband's ring, or clear out some bandits that are harassing people. 

 

I'm still having fun, I thought I'd exhaust the Hinterlands, but some of the enemies there are too high level for me to deal with, so I went off and did some story stuff. The story stuff is pretty cool. Bosses require me to use tactical cam. I like it!

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It sure would be swell if party members could auto use regen potions when slightly hurt before going for the proper healing potions. I mean I'm sure it happens *some*, but not enough that I feel I don't have to micromanage it.

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I save the regen potions for my character, he seems to be the only one who has the option. 

 

I feel like having 2 ranged and 2 melee characters is the way to go. 3 melee just feels crowded if you're trying to focus one enemy down at a time, and wasteful if you send one off to attack another. 3 ranged makes it too hard to keep aggro on one tough tank. 

 

Pretty happy with my choice of a 2-handed warrior, but he feels a little squishy. Might just be because he's always the first into battle. 

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I do find some of the quests to be just filler. No, I'm not going to collect 5 shards of mystery. I will however go help this random elf find her husband's ring, or clear out some bandits that are harassing people. 

 

I'm still having fun, I thought I'd exhaust the Hinterlands, but some of the enemies there are too high level for me to deal with, so I went off and did some story stuff. The story stuff is pretty cool. Bosses require me to use tactical cam. I like it!

 

That's pretty much exactly what I ended up doing. Once I got into the next main story thing, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the writing and quest design. To be clear, when I said the quests seem MMO-inspired at times, I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. It's just more clear that there's an uneven level of detail to different activities. Some get cut-scenes and weighty choices, others just get a few lines of text. That's fine as long as I'm enjoying my time with the game. So far, I have been.

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I'm still having fun, I thought I'd exhaust the Hinterlands, but some of the enemies there are too high level for me to deal with, so I went off and did some story stuff. The story stuff is pretty cool. Bosses require me to use tactical cam. I like it!

 

How difficult do you find it fighting higher level enemies? Like at what level difference do they feel like you shouldn't be fighting them, and to what extent can you defeat a high level enemy with the right tactics?

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I save the regen potions for my character, he seems to be the only one who has the option. 

 

You have to specifically equip each character with the potions they can use. For example, my Cassandra has health potions and armor potions, while my main character has health potions and regen potions.

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How difficult do you find it fighting higher level enemies? Like at what level difference do they feel like you shouldn't be fighting them, and to what extent can you defeat a high level enemy with the right tactics?

 

I've been having fun with the campaign so far, but this is the one thing that has bothered me. If something is 4 or more levels above you, it's just immune to your attacks. No eking out a win after a hard-bitten 10-minute battle, no exploiting AI routines to do something you shouldn't, just a road block that's impossible to defeat. Come back when you've gained 500 more experience, because for some reason that makes a difference. I wouldn't mind it so much if I dealt 0 damage or even got a bunch of MISS notifications. That would at least give the impression that an enemy is so much more powerful than me that I need to improve before taking it on. Instead, I unleash a barrage of magic missiles, lightning bolts, and fireballs and every single one of them blinks the word IMMUNE! on my screen. As much as Bioware has sold the game on being a huge open world, it's a little aggravating to have such a blatant indication that, no, it's not really as open as I'd like it to be.

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You have to specifically equip each character with the potions they can use. For example, my Cassandra has health potions and armor potions, while my main character has health potions and regen potions.

 

Didn't know that! I generally only play in 30-60 min chunks so I've not had time to grasp all the smaller systems yet. I should go to the apothecary again...

 

How difficult do you find it fighting higher level enemies? Like at what level difference do they feel like you shouldn't be fighting them, and to what extent can you defeat a high level enemy with the right tactics?

 

There isn't an obvious way to display levels, but when an enemy has a red skull, it means they're out of your level range. I came across a group of 3 demons of which one had a skull. I took him down with coordination, but he was able to two-shot my characters. It was cool to do that, however, when I tried to fight a group of 3 "skull level"...I think dwarf rogues? They tore me to shreds. I had to just run away. 

 

It'd be interesting to make an archer rogue and try kiting them, but I'll save that for another play-through. 

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That's pretty much exactly what I ended up doing. Once I got into the next main story thing, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the writing and quest design. To be clear, when I said the quests seem MMO-inspired at times, I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. It's just more clear that there's an uneven level of detail to different activities. Some get cut-scenes and weighty choices, others just get a few lines of text. That's fine as long as I'm enjoying my time with the game. So far, I have been.

 

Yeah, so far I get the impression that there's about the same amount of main story content as every Bioware game here, but there's a ton more side-quest filler. I don't mind that at all. The environments are so well done that I actually enjoy wandering through them doing inconsequential chores while my party banters with each other.

Especially when those chores let me update my fancy castle

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So are the PC controls complaints just bugs that will be worked out?  I'm trying to decide whether to pick it up on Xbox One or PC and what I've heard so far about the PC version doesn't seem so great.

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The bug fix I mentioned earlier will help M&K users, but honestly I'm with Bjorn on this. Those controls aren't good enough. Play it with a gamepad if you possibly can, on whatever system.

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Looks like if you have more than one controller plugged in, the game won't recognise any of them and won't allow you to change back without force quitting and deleting config files.

 

Disabling other controllers from device manager got the gamepad working and it controls much better than KB/M. Also, home streaming works if you run Origin through Steam, so that's a plus for controller too.

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 There isn't an obvious way to display levels 

So apparently there is! Clicking R3 locks onto an enemy (which I didn't know was possible), and displays their armour and level. Never really needed the lock on though since aiming the camera at an enemy directs your attacks towards them.

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Doing the Dragon Age Keep thing, it's a wonderful feeling when it finds my characters and choices and reminds me of them. It also reminds me of the promise of Dragon Age 2. There was potential for a great game buried there, apparently marred by lack of time and money. The Qunari conflict was amazing and Hawke's story up to that point was very different from standard fantasy fare. The story after the Qunari is not so hot and of course the whole game is marred by repetition. I'm still bothered by how no-one cleaned up the bodies in an Elven friend's mansion in the years that the story takes. The passage of time in one place is a fantastic idea very poorly executed.

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