Dragon Age III: Inquisition

Akka said:

Duh, Planescape : Torment obviously.
Also Bioshock and even more Bioshock : Infinite. And New Vegas. And a lot of others.

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And two out of those are by Obsidian. Pretty much every Obsidian game I've played had good writing. I partucularly liked how they turned standard RPG mechanics into plot points in Kotor 2. If only they had finished the game...

Pedantry mode engaged: There are a lot of people who are now Obsidian employees who worked on Torment, but it wasn't an Obsidian game.

So... Did anyone get it yet?!?! It's out now!

I also found a nice summary of hardware performance here:
http://forum.bioware.com/topic/5199...uisition-pc-performance-thread-please-see-op/

I have an i5-760, recently upgrading from a dying gtx 460 to a r9 270 so I'm good for high settings! Yey! I need more ram though, like I said 4gb, and that's only good for medium it says, though I would like to know exactly why and what can't be loaded into 4gb that drops it to medium.

Another interesting youtube of ultra preset vs low. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R58l7trgMbE&feature=youtu.be

I honestly can't tell a lot of difference other than the ultra has more stuff- more foliage on screen, more spell effects, but the textures don't really look any different or better. Though that's probably the quality of the clip. Might be more noticeable on a full hd monitor.

Also what the heck is wrong with people and sequels these days? Game is getting slammed on meta critic by fans. It's not as bad as dragon age 2 was but I worry the nostalgia of origins is again going to carry over and ruin inquisition for a lot of people. I mean everyone's entitled to their opinion, and maybe the game *isn't* as good as origins but it's disheartening to see reviews like this game sucks, origin's so much better even though I've only played it 1 hour! From the reviews it sounds like the story is a little messy at first and it takes time to get into inquisition which might be why it's suffering with user scores.

I'm kind of interested in this game. Jerry at Penny Arcade seems to really like it and he is a dude who's taste in RPG's is usually right up there. But I never played the second game because I heard it was unmitigated crap. Is the third one a direct continuation or can I play it without knowing anything about DA2?

You can use Dragon Age Keep to make choices in the second game so you never have to play it (or again if you did, yay!). It also lets you import your choices from DA1 but it does a crappy job so you have to go through them again anyway.

https://dragonagekeep.com/en_US/

PC Gamer guide: http://www.pcgamer.com/dragon-age-keep-guide/

I'm still going to wait for a complete edition.

You won't have any issues. From the sounds of it the story is confusing enough with all the internal politics and lore and other nuances that playing the second one won't help or hinder you in any way. I think hawke (the protagonist you play in 2) is in 3, but you don't play him. I don't know if he has a mere cameo appearance or more than that though.

And the second one isn't crap, it's a very different flavor than origins and wasn't well received because all the fanboys wanted origins 2. I still liked it and I think anyone who judges it objectively in a vacuum would say it's at least an average game.

Sounds like the PC port is shoddy. Supposedly the game plays great with a controller, but kb+m has a lot of problems with the controls/ui.

civvver said:

So... Did anyone get it yet?!?! It's out now!

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Urup will get in on thursday for some reason.

I also found a nice summary of hardware performance here:
http://forum.bioware.com/topic/5199...uisition-pc-performance-thread-please-see-op/

I have an i5-760, recently upgrading from a dying gtx 460 to a r9 270 so I'm good for high settings! Yey! I need more ram though, like I said 4gb, and that's only good for medium it says, though I would like to know exactly why and what can't be loaded into 4gb that drops it to medium.

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The world is supposedly huge and there are no loading screens and transitions within areas. It's the equivalent of Skyrim loading every cave/dungeon at once. I was worried bacause I skimped on the CPU during my upgrade last year and only got an i3-3220, but it looks like my video card wil be the bottleneck and bring me down from ultra to high.

Also what the heck is wrong with people and sequels these days? Game is getting slammed on meta critic by fans. It's not as bad as dragon age 2 was but I worry the nostalgia of origins is again going to carry over and ruin inquisition for a lot of people. I mean everyone's entitled to their opinion, and maybe the game *isn't* as good as origins but it's disheartening to see reviews like this game sucks, origin's so much better even though I've only played it 1 hour! From the reviews it sounds like the story is a little messy at first and it takes time to get into inquisition which might be why it's suffering with user scores.

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I read in one review that the pacing is horrible and the story and quests are kind of lame for the first 15 hours or so, but then it gets significantly better after that. Looks like many people didn't make it to that point, and I honestly can't blame them. That's a lot of patience they're asking for, considering that many RPGs can be completed in less than 10 hours without side quests. I also can't blame people for disliking the combat system and UI after only one hour, but it also took Origins longer than one hour to reveal the balance issues with magic.
And then you have "reviews" that don't talk about the game at all and give it 0 points because Steam is so much more awesome than Origin, or get angry that THE LORE has been retconned because there are gay (100% homo) characters while THE LORE of the previous games clearly established that everybody in this universe is bi. I must have mssed that detail.

civvver said:

And the second one isn't crap, it's a very different flavor than origins and wasn't well received because all the fanboys wanted origins 2. I still liked it and I think anyone who judges it objectively in a vacuum would say it's at least an average game.

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No its because DA2 is a mediocre game at best, plain and simple. While I don't compeltely regret playing it and it has some good moments, what it does well or even just decently is overwhelmed by what it does wrong. Largely because the game was horribly rushed.

- Highly repetitive, they reuse the same areas over and over and over and over again for different things. This makes the game significantly less fun and more boring.

- The city barely changes throughout the game despite 10 years going by.

-Your decisions have little real effect upon the game. No matter how badly you want to choose a side early on in the game, and try to make decisions supporting that side throughout the rest of the game, you can still switch sides completely at the end of the game and that is the only time it really matters which side you choose.

I decided early on that I wanted to side with the mages and tried to take ever opportunity to do so. But the game didn't care what side I wanted to back until the end, and it kept forcing me to fight mages as often as not.

- It does a poor job of giving you reasons to support the Templars over the mages, since the Templar leader is clearly evil and possessed. Although the mages also make a lot of bad decisions out of desperation, and I really don't think so many of them needed to turn to blood magic.

- Bloody Anders and justice. I understand what they were trying to do, and I kind of liked Anders some of the time, but I think it really did not work out very well in the game and I doubt many people hesitated in executing him.

- Fenris is one of the worst characters in the history of gaming, just an awful, awful whiny angsty emo final fantasy elf thing. I changed my decision on him in Dragon Age Keep to have him sent off back to his master.

- Isabelal would have been a great character if they hadn't constantly beat you over the head talking about how much a of a slut she is. They really needed to give that a rest.

- Combat isn't really any better than DAO, many of the new skills feel more like MMO/WoW combat crap than it does a good isometric RPG. The animations are better, and also fancier though.

- Waves of enemies spawn out of thin air which looks weird and ruins immersion.

Bunch of other stuff I forget about atm.

Maniacal said:

The animations are better, and also fancier though.

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Kinda agree with your other critics (though I'd add "unbelievable amount of mindless fighting EVERYWHERE", with its corollary "hostile beings outnumber normal ones by fifty to one even in the middle of a city" and the butchering of lore caused by encountering über-powerful abomination by the dozens every five steps), but I'm choking seeing you praise the animations. They are abysmal, and one of the worst point of the entire game - they are completely ridiculous, over-the-top and downright frenzy. Seeing your character wave around a huge two-handed sword bigger than him like if it was made of paper and faster than a dagger thrust, or seeing the mage doing dubstep while firing with his staff (seriously, do you remember the atrociously dumb flailing around with the mage staff ?), was an immersion killer.

Well I did say they were better and fancier (which isn't necessarily good or bad), not that hey are really good I agree that a lot of them were silly, or even just plain stupid.

Origin's animations are okay, but I recall a lot of them being fairly basic, and they didn't have much variety in either game.

Adding to that (I agree completely with Akka and Maniacal), I didn't like the way DA2 changed the inventory system and was somewhat disappointed at being unable to change my companions' armor.

I didn't much like Anders in DA2 (though I did in Awakening). Fenris is terrible.

I really feel like reitering that the setup to the Templar/Mage conflict is pretty bad, as the Templar leadership is obviously evil and the mages make a lot of very poor decisions, particularly so if you've been siding with them.

That being said I think DA2 is better if you play it as three separate, yet related things (similar to episodic releases) with relatively long breaks between. That helps a bit against the terrible repetition.

I don't really expect posters here to have a high view of it because you guys are much more critical of games than most gamers I know, and that's fine. But in general sequels get trashed a lot more than the originals just cus of the comparisons to the originals and you can't please everyone.

The animations are way over the top in DA2 but the animations in origins are probably my biggest criticism of the game. The dwarf with a 2h weapon looks stupid attacking, it's a huge turnoff to playing that. Most of the 2h weapon animations look like garbage and the mage attack animations are kind of lame too.

civvver said:

You won't have any issues. From the sounds of it the story is confusing enough with all the internal politics and lore and other nuances that playing the second one won't help or hinder you in any way. I think hawke (the protagonist you play in 2) is in 3, but you don't play him. I don't know if he has a mere cameo appearance or more than that though.

And the second one isn't crap, it's a very different flavor than origins and wasn't well received because all the fanboys wanted origins 2. I still liked it and I think anyone who judges it objectively in a vacuum would say it's at least an average game.

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Thanks! Although my interest in the game was killed stone dead when I realized you can't buy it on Steam. Sorry, EA, I'm not installing your awful proprietary DRM software just to play a game when I have a million other things I can play instead.

Origin really isn't that bad, its pretty unobtrusive actually. Its one of the few things were EA does makes more good decisions than bad ones. Not all of EA's games even require you to launch Origin to play them even if you downloaded them through it. I don't know if DAI requires Origin to launch or not though. Afaik its mostly for MP games.

And yeah the 2handed animations aren't great in either DA game. I finally started playing Awakening and the sword an shield animations aren't as stiff as I remember them being. Still a bit on the stiff side, but I don't mind them.

I don't really understand why someone would be fine with steam but not with origin client. They are essentially the same thing, just different layouts and content. Although steam downloader seems to get better speeds for me as well.

Maybe it's better now. The one time I tried Origin was when the original Dragon Age first came out, and it was horrible. Intrusive, slow, just terrible all around. I bought Dragon Age and then ended up ALSO torrenting it so I could play it without Origin.

Huh ? The first Dragon Age doesn't require Origin. My only Origin game so far is Mass Effect 3, and everything worked fine. I would still prefer it if it required Steam or nothing, but that's just for the convenience of having one account for all my games.

Origin didn't come out until two years after DAO

Angry Joe's impression so far seems pretty positive:

Cuz im being asked, Yes. DA:I is Magnitudes better than DA2 in Scope, Mechanics and Story. You are safe, even though DA2 wasnt all that bad.

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(He gave DA:O a 9 and DA2 a 7.)