DA:inquisition Rant. [Spoilers]

[Verzin]

This is just my personal experience with the game, since it just got me to ragequit a bossfight because it was taking too long and was boring...and it's really late here.

Naturally I write a forum post crying about it. Here it is.

I was very dubious about this game. With DA:II being an action/adventure game disguised as an RPG I was worried that EABioware would ruin the series for good.

I've put 33 hours so far into this new one, and enjoyed it far though. somewhat... It's been a little forced and eroded by a huge number of minor technical issues and design nitpicks..(Let's just say that this game was designed and optimized for a controller and the Keyboard-Mouse controls are....usable. barely.) On Hard with friendly fire turned on for spells the game is fairly challenging. though i think sometimes in the wrong ways.

General Review.

Spoiler

I will probably put over 80 hours into this game maybe more...maybe much less. So far, I've enjoyed it, though I'm still annoyed at the voice overs for main characters removing dialogue options and...simplification of a lot of stat and ability systems..and no blood magic :'(. The Areas are beautiful and MASSIVE, packed with things to do, and there seem to be a lot of them. On Hard with friendly fire turned on for spells the game is fairly challenging, though it rarely requires anything more than positioning and shield spamming. (Healing is gone by the way...you have magic AOE shields now). I won't go into details, but let me tell you that you can just smell the Taint of the executives in some of the design choice. it's masked with mostly pleasant perfume though..so..eh Shove it in my face deeper you executive/legalteam shits. you fucking console pandering scum.

RANT

Spoiler

The way the game was balanced in terms of enemy health and damage reduction has REALLY started to annoy me. at around level 13, through the plot quests you're thrown against enemies, normal enemies, mind you, of The Same Level as you that can take...7-15 minutes to finish killing. You're not really in much danger during this time...you just sit there and cycle shields for 10 minutes while you plink at them. Oh and by the way armor reduces damage from staffs now apparently. significantly.

To give you an example of what's pissing me off: Using the best available weapons, armor, and mods for each, you will be doing 20 damage per attack to be reduced from a health pool of 15,000+(at the lowest end.) for NORMAL enemies. 1/750 of their health. usually four of them. FUCK THAT. (and they are NOT resistant to the elements of the weapons, or at least, the game says that they're not, and no element seems to work.)

before this stage it's more like 80-230 per hit. Spells doing 200%-1600% of that.

Regardless, after putting up with 2ish hours of this I come to the end and fight the boss...a human. The stupid bastard noblewoman has more health than a dragon. Armors up(a shield you have to fully damage down to start hurting her again) constantly AND you can't do anything about it but plink at the stupid shield, Summons adds it takes 5+ minutes of shielding/plinking to kill, and knocks you the crap around constantly being extremely annoying and CCing everybody. I seriously got halfway through this fight before I realized I'd spend a halfhour doing this and she was still at half health...I wasn't in much danger the whole time. Just shield cycling over and over. Had over half my emergency potions left.I was just sitting there doing 20 damage with my attacks(up to 250 with hardest hitting spells), and I did not have the strength to continue.. Fights should not be that prolonged and without variation in RPGs without it being like a dragon or...fucking...ultima or something. not some stupid noblewoman who somehow is as tough as a dragon, though less interesting to fight.

 

[Hakeem]

I have not played the game at all yet, though I intend to buy it soon.

One thing that stood out to me though is, don't you think that the fact you're playing on Hard mode might have something to do with it? I would consider hard mode to not be the game the developers "intended" you to play per say. It is a mode that is intentionally harder than the norm to challenge your gaming skills. Only if the issue of having to fight basic guys for a very long time persists on the normal difficulty would I say that it is an issue. Otherwise it sounds like a pretty normal facet of amped up difficulty.

 

[Grendich]

Only problem I have with that is that's pretty much the laziest and most artificial way to increase difficulty. Hard mode shouldn't just give the enemies a lot of health so it takes forever to kill them, that's just a boring slog.

It's not even 'difficulty', it's just tedious. So thats really all the harder difficulties do? add more HP?

Meh, i was really excited for Inquisition, since i heard a lot of good things about it. And very likely going to buy it (once it's on sale or something. 60? for a game is just ridiculous).

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

On the flip side the character creation was just fucking brilliant, but it fell into the BioWare beard trap. Quit having the beards hover an inch off our faces no matter how wide we make the jaw, it looks lazy.

Not only that, the beards seem to have noticeably worse textures than any other part of the body.

 

[Hakeem]

I agree that it's not a good way to increase difficulty. But if it's only present in hard mode and not the normal difficulty then it would it least be understandable. If the pace of combat on normal is still that tedious then that would be a definite minus in my book.

 

[asdfen]

just finished playing it 80 hours most of the quest dragons romance done
should have quit it right at the beginning when I had a feeling its all going to be simple grind of collectibles and fetch quest instead of anything interesting. I just felt compelled.
I also completely agree that combat is awful another thing that is totally off are the random sky rocket high one hit ko enemies that are sprinkled here and there that encountered unexpectedly in a map you have been wiping the floor with for hours. I am not talking about something unique here either it could be the spiders you have been killing a while but these same looking spiders are for some reason high level and then you find out that autosave that you saw saving the game 30 seconds ago rolled you back an half an hour.

not to mention rampant savegame corruption present in this game on top of all bad gameplay. I've lost around 10 save files during my play.

Even Dragon Age 2 was better than this game and that was meh at best.

After putting 80 hours into the game and finishing it I cannot save that I have enjoyed any aspect of it. It was a monotonous grind all the way through.

 

[Little Gray]

RANT

Spoiler

The way the game was balanced in terms of enemy health and damage reduction has REALLY started to annoy me. at around level 13, through the plot quests you're thrown against enemies, normal enemies, mind you, of The Same Level as you that can take...7-15 minutes to finish killing. You're not really in much danger during this time...you just sit there and cycle shields for 10 minutes while you plink at them. Oh and by the way armor reduces damage from staffs now apparently. significantly.

To give you an example of what's pissing me off: Using the best available weapons, armor, and mods for each, you will be doing 20 damage per attack to be reduced from a health pool of 15,000+(at the lowest end.) for NORMAL enemies. 1/750 of their health. usually four of them. FUCK THAT. (and they are NOT resistant to the elements of the weapons, or at least, the game says that they're not, and no element seems to work.)

You have to be doing something wrong because I am playing on nightmare and doing considerably more damage then that. As a two handed warrior around level 10 I was consistently hitting 200+ with my melee and without combos doing 600+ with abilities, with combos I have hit over 1000 damage. I am level 16 now and doing even more damage, against enemies with guard up I have hit over 2700 damage. Most normal enemies last 15 seconds or so tops. Rogues also do much much more dps if used properly as well.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

RANT

Spoiler

The way the game was balanced in terms of enemy health and damage reduction has REALLY started to annoy me. at around level 13, through the plot quests you're thrown against enemies, normal enemies, mind you, of The Same Level as you that can take...7-15 minutes to finish killing. You're not really in much danger during this time...you just sit there and cycle shields for 10 minutes while you plink at them. Oh and by the way armor reduces damage from staffs now apparently. significantly.

To give you an example of what's pissing me off: Using the best available weapons, armor, and mods for each, you will be doing 20 damage per attack to be reduced from a health pool of 15,000+(at the lowest end.) for NORMAL enemies. 1/750 of their health. usually four of them. FUCK THAT. (and they are NOT resistant to the elements of the weapons, or at least, the game says that they're not, and no element seems to work.)

You have to be doing something wrong because I am playing on nightmare and doing considerably more damage then that. As a two handed warrior around level 10 I was consistently hitting 200+ with my melee and without combos doing 600+ with abilities, with combos I have hit over 1000 damage. I am level 16 now and doing even more damage, against enemies with guard up I have hit over 2700 damage. Most normal enemies last 15 seconds or so tops. Rogues also do much much more dps if used properly as well.

Agreed. At level 13 I routinely hit a 2000 plus on my rogues deathblow. This can kill the squishier enemy classes from 50 percent outright. Admittedly, I'm playing on normal, but aside from the high dragon and enemy elites, I get through a group in a couple minutes or so at most.

 

[angryscotsman93]

... Are you still using level one gear or something? Christ, man, I DEMOLISH enemies. Most of my fights end in less than 20 seconds, because I built my Knight-Enchanter around cycling Spirit Blade, Immolate, and that ability that lets you go immaterial and then materialize inside someone for massive damage. I don't think your seeming inability to kill anything is the game's fault, pal. Maybe you just don't know how to build a high-damage character.

 

[Gennadios]

The Angry Joe let's play of the game was played on Hard and I did notice that the starter mobs took efing forever to kill.

Honestly, really poor hardmode balancing was an issue throughout the whole series. Both DA:0 and DA2 took forever to get through even the most basic encounters.

I'll admit that the combat didn't seem very much fun in the video, I think I'll be sitting this one out. I'm just surprised that the first complaint wasn't writing related.