melmer

Nobody expects the Dragon Age Inquisition

Recommended Posts

I too have been playing the game, here is some thoughts I had:

 

1) The character creation tool is great, but it kind lack more hair options and ability to also change the body, some of the presets aren´t that good and I haven´t found (nor a believe it exist) a way to change you character look ingame (like the ~showracemenu in Bethesa games) but saving that is very good customization - I would put right behind Aion (MMO from Ncsoft), Perfect World (MMO), Skyrim (it had at least a "weight slider" for body) and them Dragon Age Inquisition, followed by Oblivion (with mods, otherwise it would be behind the next game), Guild Wars (I and II),

 

2) Performance is good, better that I would expect (on pc) for a game just launched.

 

3) Now about the game...it just amazingly very good, I am loving it so far. While some people might compare it to Skyrim (a game which I love too), I do felt that Inquisition in fact is what more close Peter Molineux is what he allways claiming that he will do but never get it right. What I mean is that Inquisition does have lots of systems, much like some Fable titles have, but here it works very well and is well weaved together, while Skyrim is more about exploring a open world that much is designed to give modder support (which is one the reason I like elder scrolls games). So Inquisition I felt is a good middle ground between this two games.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Three hours in. 

 

I loved Dragon Age 1, I did not play 2. So far the way they introduce/set up the world is terrible, I remember the basic set up of Chantry, Templars, Circle, Grey Wardens, Darkspawn, etc... but they kind of just throw you in there without saying what is actually going on, it's all about the immediate problem of this rift. I couldn't tell you if this was before DA1 or hundreds of years after until I started talking with some characters only to find out that people from DA 1 are still alive... so okay cool, doubt I'll meet them, but at least I get a sense of where I am now. Just the tone and world feel so different, I would have expected it to be on a different time line.

 

Races - I loved DA's fiction, but I can't tell if I got the choice to play a Dalish Elf or a city Elf; I assume the same goes with the Dwarven High/Low class... do they let you pick or are you stuck with what they got?

 

Combat - It's different, I expected this. So far they have taken it pretty easy on me, so I can't tell if the tactical view is for anything or not? I haven't got into "programming" my buddies either, but this seems a little more like a recent Final Fantasy, I think?

 

Environments - I'm in the first area they send you too after the tutorial stuff, seems big, open, it's kind of weird, sometimes I feel like I am breaking out of the gameplay space as there's not a lot to find out side the main paths. DA 1 was a little like this, but these feels far more expansive, it's kind of neat, but now I kind of wanted the whole game to connect in a way that Fable 2 did, but I get the feeling that won't be the case (like the first one). It may also be my poor graphic settings, but there are a lot of glitches, popping elements, shadows, mesh scattering, etc...

 

Customization - I got totally screwed on this, I used a preset head for my elf mage (Head 3 or 4) did some tweaks and one of the first companions you meet is an elf mage that looks nearly exactly like me, only less character creator, so now I just have these two, nearly identical characters walking around, I almost want to restart.

 

I knew going in it wasn't going to be DA 1 and I'm up for change, I just don't know how I feel about the game so far, nothing about the story is intriguing (Which was the case for DA1) and I just haven't gotten into the world fiction yet to really enjoy it. I'm still puzzled at how my "imported" world state has changed anything, because I would have expected the Templars to be gone, but they are renegades or something now, I dunno. It's still early. 

 

One this is certain, I'm going to need a better video card, Mordor suffered from my poor 550ti and Dragon Age is just kicking it's ass and not looking good.

 

If anyone has some affordable recommendations that your using and running it smoothly, I'd love to get some.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It seems like enemies respawn a bit quicker than I'd like in the open areas. I wish the area would stay clear until I left the map and came back at least.

 

Still, having a lot of fun, though I keep wasting my power and having to go close more rifts to get it back, which I guess isn't such a bad thing.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The SP stuff is way more my wife's type of game, so I end up watching her play more than I do play it myself. But DAI has already fulfilled my criteria for being a good spectacting game. She wandered into some valley, and spotted a baby dragon, at which point she went all kitten dumb over it. Then mother showed up, dropped a fireball on the party, there was much screaming (by my wife) and running away hijinx.

Watching something go hilariously wrong is my favorite thing about watching other people play.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The SP stuff is way more my wife's type of game, so I end up watching her play more than I do play it myself. But DAI has already fulfilled my criteria for being a good spectacting game. She wandered into some valley, and spotted a baby dragon, at which point she went all kitten dumb over it. Then mother showed up, dropped a fireball on the party, there was much screaming (by my wife) and running away hijinx.

Watching something go hilariously wrong is my favorite thing about watching other people play.

 

Got through the tutorial and saw the title screen, thought it was a weak start.  I got 5 hours into DA:O before getting bored, and skipped DA2, so my knowledge of past events is not great.  So far not really sure what's going on.  There's a book that's telling us how to start an Inquisition.  Where did that book come from, who are these people, etc.  I should block off some of my thanksgiving holiday time to get into the lore.

 

Playing SP with my wife, which means that it's going to be months IF we ever get through the storyline.  I'm enjoying the leisurely pace.  Plus it means that I can give the MP a fair shake.  Almost up to the max level for the easy runs.  Enjoying it so far.  My Keeper is learning some interesting skills (sticking with buffs), and I love the dash ability.  I'm so used to leveling up in Destiny, where a new power feels so slight, where all the players do the same thing.  Here there's a real nice definition between characters.  Plus there's at least 9 or 10 to unlock.  And the chests!  The randomness is delightful.  Little bit of Dota2 chest magic.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Customization - I got totally screwed on this, I used a preset head for my elf mage (Head 3 or 4) did some tweaks and one of the first companions you meet is an elf mage that looks nearly exactly like me, only less character creator, so now I just have these two, nearly identical characters walking around, I almost want to restart.

 

If you're talking about Solas, you'll get the chance to swap him out of your party after too long. If anything I'm finding that my list of available characters (9 or so hours in) is a bit mage-heavy.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah, I figured I could get rid of him eventually, but I might just make a different character. I'm not sure if Mage is the most interesting choice for this game.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

It's beginning to occur to me that I'll have a lot of mages available to me. It's making me wish I had made someone of another class, but I really don't want to restart entirely as I've already put nearly 10 hours in.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That's kind of a shame, because I always thought the whole Circle vs Templar thing was always the most interesting thing out of DA, so I wanted to play Mage. I essentially just remade my character from DA1, but maybe it's time to play something else since I am so early in.

 

edit: Also, trying to narrow down my performance problems in my head (Rather than just playing with settings at home) and just wondering if anyone notices hitching when they think the game is loading in content? I noticed it in the inquisition hub, between the church and outside, it seems like they were loading content inside when I was outside and my poor PC grinds to a halt. I can't imagine this is GPU stuff, which means my CPU is also having problems.. which would be very disappointing because that isn't getting changed any time soon.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah, I think the game is quite heavy on the CPU. I have over 90% CPU usage at times and there are areas in which it will stutter for a little while and then be all right, as if loading, like you said.

 

That was basically my reasoning, Murdoc; since the mages vs templars thing is such a big part of the world I enjoyed being a mage, and both my DA1 and DA2 characters were mages. But I don't really want to have more than two mages in the party at most which means I can only ever have one NPC mage with me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I wouldn't worry about changing characters if you're a mage. I have 3 warrior types to choose from, two rogues, and several mages, and I'm only 9-10 hours in. I imagine there will be more. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I can say that it's hitting my Hard Drive pretty hard in those loading areas, not sure if you're running an SSD or what, but I get some minor hitching from my RAID array after load points.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Dragon Age Inquisition can't get info from Dragon Age Keep because I have no Origin account connected to my PS4/PSN. Origin can't connect to my PS4 because you can only connect accounts by logging into Origin on the PS4, but DAI won't prompt a login. I boot up Battlefield 4 to hope to log into Origin there, suprise! I need a 4GB update that will take 3 hours to DL. Thanks, EA. GREAT

 

0 minutes in, my experience is pretty bad. I guess it's all uphill from here, eventually.

 

Update: So, my PSN account is associated with an Origin account that I don't use for anything else. All my previous Dragon Age save data and now my Dragon Age keep info is associated with a different account. There's apparently a workaround way to make things work where you share the "world state" from one account to the other, but Origin is some broke ass shit and so I literally cannot "Keep Friend" my two accounts and thus cannot share my world state. In other words, their "quick fix" method doesn't work for me. The chat wait time for customer support was 30 minutes, so I had customer support call me. I've been on the phone for 15 minutes and I've just been passed to an account specialist since I guess the Dragon Age Inquisition customer support can't do shit for me.

 

Origin is the goddamn worst. I've been working on this for two hours now to no avail.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Fighting dragons is amazing. I got my ass handed to me, but taking one down to 1/3 HP was so much fun.

 

I've also come across new specs for my inqisitor. Reaver is pretty fun! I went ahead and put pretty much all my points into it and it's a totally different play style. Ironically I was having issues with my warrior taking too much damage, but now, things tend to die before I'm even at 1/2 HP. Fortunately there's a spammable move that damages you, and a high-stamina move that heals, so you can control you HP which is nice - I like having to manage more than one resource.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

 knew going in it wasn't going to be DA 1 and I'm up for change, I just don't know how I feel about the game so far, nothing about the story is intriguing (Which was the case for DA1) and I just haven't gotten into the world fiction yet to really enjoy it. I'm still puzzled at how my "imported" world state has changed anything, because I would have expected the Templars to be gone, but they are renegades or something now, I dunno. It's still early. 

 

I wonder. So far Varric's been talking about Hawke's brother even though he's dead and they never met. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah, I feel like they are talking more about Dragon Age 2, which I did not play and could give no shits about, so I feel totally disconnected. 

 

I played another hour last night, still might restart just for my character appearance. I don't think I like this game and I can't put my finger on why that is... 

 

Since it is American Thanksgiving here this weekend, I'm either going to play it for 4 days straight or a little at a time and that will pretty much tell me if I actually enjoy the game or not.

 

I'm having a tough time wrapping around the structure of the game and I think thats why I can't tell if I'm actually enjoying it or not. It's seems to have the design of a little from column A (like an arkham game/assassins), a little of column B (Bioware RPG) and a little of column C (Bethseda RPGS and other things). I can't tell if it's doing anything particularly well, it's just a weird collection of features and structures that is kind interesting, but sort of sloppy.

 

Specifically, I noticed traversal. It's got all these hidden areas and even secrets to places you normally should not get to in a Bioware game, but is more akin to an AC or Arkham kind of open world, yet the animation system and movement system wasn't designed for it, so it feels like an old school 3d game where it feels like I am breaking the game or doing something I shouldn't do to get into these areas... it's kind of off putting for something at this level of detail, but also kind of fun for that old school PC gamer in me. I just don't know how I feel about the whole thing.

 

** The streaming/loading shouldn't be hard drive dependant, but CPU. I only noticed it really badly in Haven, so I think my issues are still GPU, but they have mostly settled while I am roaming the hinterlands. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Update: So, my PSN account is associated with an Origin account that I don't use for anything else. All my previous Dragon Age save data and now my Dragon Age keep info is associated with a different account. There's apparently a workaround way to make things work where you share the "world state" from one account to the other, but Origin is some broke ass shit and so I literally cannot "Keep Friend" my two accounts and thus cannot share my world state. In other words, their "quick fix" method doesn't work for me. The chat wait time for customer support was 30 minutes, so I had customer support call me. I've been on the phone for 15 minutes and I've just been passed to an account specialist since I guess the Dragon Age Inquisition customer support can't do shit for me.

 

I had a similar situation, where my Xbox Live account is linked to some old Origin account that has been deleted, which is linked to an old email address which is also deleted.  I ended up contacting customer support in the hopes they could delete the old account, with no luck.  I was however able to get them to share my world state with the old account on their end (their workaround didn't work for me either) so I could import that into my game at the start on xbox.  While this did work I don't think it brought over the world state correctly, after playing for a few hours I ran into some dialogue about a character from DA:I having been killed where he was supposed to be alive.  For as full featured as this game is, it is odd to me that they didn't just make the keep accessible from inside the game to avoid this kind of frustration.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I had a similar situation, where my Xbox Live account is linked to some old Origin account that has been deleted, which is linked to an old email address which is also deleted.  I ended up contacting customer support in the hopes they could delete the old account, with no luck.  I was however able to get them to share my world state with the old account on their end (their workaround didn't work for me either) so I could import that into my game at the start on xbox.  While this did work I don't think it brought over the world state correctly, after playing for a few hours I ran into some dialogue about a character from DA:I having been killed where he was supposed to be alive.  For as full featured as this game is, it is odd to me that they didn't just make the keep accessible from inside the game to avoid this kind of frustration.

 

Importing the world state is not a substitute for taking the time to set things up in the keep. It pretty much just pulls in your character config, you still have to set a bunch of stuff manually. 

 

By the same token JonCole, you can probably just skip the data import and set it up manually.

 

Yeah, I feel like they are talking more about Dragon Age 2, which I did not play and could give no shits about, so I feel totally disconnected. 

 

Hmm, maybe I just made different decisions or something, or maybe it's just my complete non-knowledge of DA2, but it seems like there's been a ton of DA1 mentions. Off the top of my head I can think of several arguments about whether Logain did the right thing at the start of DA:O, several mentions of the queen that I put on the throne, and of course Leliana is the spymaster (unless you killed her I guess, which could explain a lot.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

What? Ok, I checked my keep and she totally is alive but I'm pretty sure she isn't my spy master.  I guess the quarter master mentioned Logain and such, but that was basically the only mention I heard.

 

Granted, I've played for not very long and my companions just started to chat to each other now, I was about to comment on how they have been completely silent, but they are getting chatty now.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

From the stuff I'm reading, she's always your spymaster even if you got her killed in DA:O. Maybe you just didn't recognize her? It took me a few visits to the war table before I put two and two together.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Importing the world state is not a substitute for taking the time to set things up in the keep. It pretty much just pulls in your character config, you still have to set a bunch of stuff manually. 

 

By the same token JonCole, you can probably just skip the data import and set it up manually.

 

Yeah, but I had already run Dragon Age Keep on my real Origin account, importing my saves from PC and building the world state choice by choice. If I had known that it was going to be this shitty process, I would have just run Keep on the old Origin account I didn't even want and forgot about the importing thing. On the bright side, now my primary Origin account has everything under one umbrella so it'll work moving forward.

 

Frankly, I'm just annoyed that Origin has been so poorly implemented thus far. So many games on 360/PS3 had you log into Origin for no reason but to mine data for EA, so of course I didn't care what account was associated with what Origin login. Now they build a system completely dependent on something they've trained me to not give a shit about, so I'm just so goddamn annoyed that it doesn't work without being on the phone for almost an hour.

 

On the other topic, I'd guess that more from Dragon Age Origins would tie in as there are just so many more decisions that it asks for in Keep. I mean, it took my about twice as long to complete the Origins section than that of DA2. I haven't actually played the game at all thus far though, so whatever.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Importing the world state is not a substitute for taking the time to set things up in the keep. It pretty much just pulls in your character config, you still have to set a bunch of stuff manually. 

 

I did actually set things up in the keep, but the issue was my Xbox account is linked to some deleted origin account so I couldn't transfer what I set up in the keep, which is apparently linked to my new account.  Before trying to set this up I didn't realize I had 2 accounts, and customer service told me I couldn't transfer the Xbox account link, nor could I delete the old account, nor could I transfer the save from my origin account to my old deleted account on my own.  Really the whole situation would have been avoided if Origin allowed you to unlink and relink other accounts to an origin account, or if EA could have actually deleted the record of my old account.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

From the stuff I'm reading, she's always your spymaster even if you got her killed in DA:O. Maybe you just didn't recognize her? It took me a few visits to the war table before I put two and two together.

Yeah I did a search and I guess that is her, but with a hood. It's been like 2-3 years, so my memory is fuzzy. Also, I was pretty sure she had a heavier accent, but maybe I wasn't paying attention.

 

This kind of goes back to my original comment about how the game does a really poor job setting up the world. I will say the subtle way they throw in a Dragon Age 1 character there without any sort of reverence is somewhat cool in it's own way.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think they're working really hard to make this a new start point for the series, so they want to put the call-backs in for long time fans but not make them obvious enough to turn-off those new to the series. Fine with me, I'd have been pretty annoyed if they were rubbing DA2 in my face since I haven't played it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I went in with a default world-state considering I didn't play DA2 and when I went to DA Keep I had forgotten everything I did in Origins years ago. 

 

I'm desperate to start a new save to see if I prefer one of the other classes, but 30 hours in feels too late to restart, especially as I'm really enjoying Reaver spec.

I'm pretty sure I'd like mage a lot more than in DA:O. In Origins mage was incredibly boring, and I found myself playing the healer, making sure my retarded AI team mates didn't die. Without those healing spells, and with all the CC abilities, I bet mage would be amazing.

Maybe I'll restart on Insane as a mage - I am tempted to go for the Platinum on this because it's so much fun. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now