Why did BioWare not do a good job with DA: Inquisition?

[EbonBehelit]

Bioware didn't do a good job with DA:I? You wouldn't think it considering the amount of accolades it got - on this site no less.

Not that I've actually played the game though: Bioware games are unappealing to me, and I can't put my finger on why that is.
Hell, I've actually had the original Dragon Age sitting in my steam library for aaaages, yet never been bothered to start playing it despite the almost universal acclaim it has.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Snip

I can see that. Inquisition needed a more personal element to ground the larger scale. Actually, that does a good job of summing up my biggest problem with Inquisition's plot. Yeah, the pacing was weird and the big bad turned out to be kind of pathetic, but Origins had those same problems for me. I guess the difference was Origins was camped more in your companions, with Alistair becoming King and Morrigan wanting the OGB, and even side characters like Loghain or Zathrian. The companions in Inquisition did feel like they were mostly disconnected from the plot, though. Only Cassandra and Solas are truly important, and Solas doesn't even really gain importance until the end.

This is a trap Bioware seems to have been stepping in since Mass Effect 2, where they just throw heaps of companions at you without properly incorperating them into the plot. In Mass Effect 2 this kind of worked since it's supposed to be this ragtag team that you need to keep together. But this is not something that needs to be repeated for every other game.

 

[Smooth Operator]

DA:I didn't fail, they just made what the fans asked for. I'm not talking about anyone in specific I mean they moulded the game to fit focus groups, and they did so very well, the game has a bit of everything to a small and easily digestible extent which makes it the perfect mass market product.

But is also means things get very... McDonalds, if you were looking for something with a specific taste then look elsewhere.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

Does anyone know why they chose the title "Inquisition?"

Seems like a weird choice to me because in the game you don't really do much "Inquisiting," you just raise your own army to fight the big bad. Why did they use such a loaded word for such a generic faction? I thought I'd be torturing people like the Spanish Inquisition

 

[laggyteabag]

I feel that Inquisitions greatest failure came from the fact that it was far too big for its own good, and they failed to fill that space with interesting content, though, this is a very common issue with open world games.

You spent all your time trudging from quest hub to quest objective doing nothing along the way but collecting materials (of which there were FAR too many nodes) and killing the occasional patrol.

Another problem was that the quests that you did felt far too mundane, and more like something that you would order your soldiers to do, whilst a lot of the war table missions seemed far more interesting and important, yet they ended up being little more than a facebook game. Can I speak to the Hero of Ferelden or King Alistair? Maybe go to Kirkwall and help defend the city against Starkhaven? No? Well, I guess I will go and collect some deer pelts because people are cold.

 

[JohnZ117]

To me, the title of this thread is wrong. DA: I is a good game. The issue is that we (fairly) expected Bioware to do a great, or stupendous, job, as with their previous titles. It's like the Star Wars prequel movies. Jar Jar Binks, midiclorians, and the badly written romance can fuck off as far as I'm concerned, but the rest is a good story. Meanwhile, the first 3 made up a wonderful tale, and when the fourth came out, we (again fairly) expected the same or better. I think most of the characters are some of Bioware's best yet, and many of the environments are damned amazing, but having too much leaves much to be desired. I hope, and expect (fairly) for Bioware to evaluate what went wrong and improve on those for the next games.

 

[Nimzabaat]

I feel that Inquisitions greatest failure came from the fact that it was far too big for its own good, and they failed to fill that space with interesting content, though, this is a very common issue with open world games.

You spent all your time trudging from quest hub to quest objective doing nothing along the way but collecting materials (of which there were FAR too many nodes) and killing the occasional patrol.

Another problem was that the quests that you did felt far too mundane, and more like something that you would order your soldiers to do, whilst a lot of the war table missions seemed far more interesting and important, yet they ended up being little more than a facebook game. Can I speak to the Hero of Ferelden or King Alistair? Maybe go to Kirkwall and help defend the city against Starkhaven? No? Well, I guess I will go and collect some deer pelts because people are cold.

Just so you know... The Witcher 3 is a lot bigger with less to do. If you felt the Hinterlands was boring, you haven't seen Velen. It's the first game where you really need a horse or fast travel because content is pretty scarce and far apart. It's not like Skyrim where you can walk for a couple minutes and stumble on something to do. Also, aside from a few stand out quests (which really stand out though), the Witcher contracts and side content is pretty much all the same. TW3 feels a lot like something that the Inquisitor would just get someone else to do (a professional monster hunter perhaps?). Think of it as DAI is the Avengers, TW3 is Daredevil (Netflix version). Both are really good in their own way, but one has a bigger budget and it shows.

I think we at the Escapist want to feel that DAI failed because of the massive anti-AAA bias here. I mean in this thread alone we're pretending that Bioware's top selling title with tons of accolades was, in some way, a failure. I mean, I know this is supposed to be an escape from reality but... reality has cookies.

Don't get me wrong, the Witcher 3 is an awesome game... for a non AAA company. So like the Souls series it gets a pass on things that would be torn apart otherwise.

More gratuitous nudity than every Bioware title combined? Unacceptable from a AAA but it makes TW3 "mature".
More glitches than a Bethesda title? Unacceptable from a AAA but it makes TW3 "charming"?
Rape? Hell, in MGS they caught flack for just mentioning it once.
A bloated and unwieldy inventory system that make Mass Effects (yes the first one) look simplistic? Wouldn't fly from anyone else.

You get the picture.

[small]Okay, who am I kidding? [/small]

 

[Chester Rabbit]

Do you people ever just...enjoy things?

 

[Amaror]

More gratuitous nudity than every Bioware title combined? Unacceptable from a AAA but it makes TW3 "mature".
More glitches than a Bethesda title? Unacceptable from a AAA but it makes TW3 "charming"?
Rape? Hell, in MGS they caught flack for just mentioning it once.
A bloated and unwieldy inventory system that make Mass Effects (yes the first one) look simplistic? Wouldn't fly from anyone else.

You get the picture.

[small]Okay, who am I kidding? [/small]

I don't really know why you concider nudity unacceptable but to each their own i guess. But the rest of your argument are fairly hilarious. More glitches than a Bethesda title? Can you please back that up in some way, all i hear is how bugless the Witcher 3 is compared to other Open World games. Rape? Must have missed that scene, can you please show it to me?
A bad inventory? Really? The Witcher 3's inventory is not great i grant you that, but DAI inventory system was a disgrace and Witcher 3's is miles better.
I don't mean to attack you, if you personally like DAI better then more power to you, but if you want to tell us that all it's critics are just mean to AAA games because it's "cool" than you'll have to do better than that.

Edit: I just saw that your currently mostly in the Witcher thread trying everything to bash the game, so please don't respond to this, i allready know that a discussion with you will most likely be fruitless.

 

[Ishal]

snip

I see others have already given more broad examples, so I'll give a smaller one.

This will contain very light spoilers for the first area of the game.

Spoiler

In the first area, one of the very first things you do is find and kill a monster for the Nilfgaardian garrison captain. The Nilfs are stationed there and occupying the area. They're dealing with all kinds of shit, so their captain hires you.

Before you talk to him you see him negotiating with a villager to get grain for his men. He's nice about it, says he won't take more than he needs and leave the villagers with nothing. After you complete the quest you come back and see the villager has brought the grain, but it is rotten. The captain is furious. The villager says he didn't know, regardless the captain orders him to whipped 15 times for it. After you end the cutscene and dialogue, you regain control of your character and can hear him getting lashed, rather loudly. He's begging and pleading for it to stop.

If you actually wait, he is indeed whipped 15 times. I stopped and counted it out. They put that level of detail into the game. Where I bet a lot of people would have just ran off and not cared. That attention to detail is mostly everywhere in this game. It connects a lot of what would be scattered in other games. Like others have said, it feels lived in. I know it's hard to say it in text, but this game is massive. You won't realize it until you play.

 

[Xyebane]

I think the problem with Bioware is that it is now a Brand instead of a developer. Instead of being a team of people, it is now a brand of EA with an endless supply of designers, programmers and artists who pop out of college and into the EA meat grinder and such it is no longer a produces innovative an passionate projects, but is forced to produce its formulaic games to meet the expectations of it's fans and investors alike.

TLDR:: Bioware = Brand = Formulaic

 

[Danbo Jambo]

Isn't this a bit "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Kind of a loaded question. I did not enjoy Inquisition, but I seem to be in the minority on that one.

They were too busy trying to ape popular RPGs of today rather than delivering the style of RPG that helped make Bioware popular. Origins is one of my favourite games ever but each subsequent installment has felt like an attempt to appeal to a broader market by cramming more and more in there while simultaneously removing the more micromanagement-esque elements that I actually enjoy.

That's not a minority POV though, I'd say that's the majority POV.

As someone who's good mates with quite a few "COD loving bro-dudes", I've borrowed them my copy of DA:I to play and they all either hated it or thought it was "meh" at best. None of them finished it.

Bioware sold it's core fanbase out for these people, and I think it's failed to really make an impact with them. For me the game's sales are all because of hype, advertising and lust for a proper sequal to DA:O. Nothing to do with quality or breaking a new market.

A Metacritic score of 5.8 across a range of 1351 people for the PC shows it didn't impress. Say what you want about score manipulation, but for every Bioware hater rating 0 there's a Bioware lover rating 10, and that score is a good reflection on the overall opinion (personally, I rated the game a 6/10).

So to those other posters saying "DA:I was good", looking at over a thousand's people opinion, it wasn't, it was above average just.

 

[Jake Martinez]

I think it comes down to design aesthetics.

First off, there's the world - The Witcher's world has always been this very immersive grim-dark setting and the developers spend a lot of time building on it. When you play an RPG, part of the experience that you want is to feel like you're lost in another world, so I think on that level, CD-PR really delivers. Inversely, The DA games from Bioware sort of started off with this really impressive and dark lore as well, but as the series has gone on it's gotten more neutered and more, for lack of a better term, "Politically Correct". There are a lot of modern day attitudes and themes in the Bioware characters that feel anachronistic in a high fantasy RPG, so much so that in many cases it quite reminds me that I am playing a game.

Building on that theme there is also the maturity of the story telling. I don't mean the "adult-ish" sexual content (both games feature this but in different ways), I mean in the way each game portrays a story. In the Witcher, the actions of Geralt are quite open to interpretation based upon how you decide to guide him. There are many times in the story when you do something for perhaps a "good reason" but ends up having a bad effect (sometimes because you weren't paying attention). Good and evil and wrong and right aren't quite clearly defined. Now, in Bioware's games in general they have made this whole push between deciding "good" and "bad" morality of player actions. This goes way back, probably even before KOTOR and obviously everyone is familiar with it in Mass Effect. In DA: I it's not quite as ever-present as it is in ME, but you absolutely get this feeling that they branch dialogue with the approach of "This is the good guy way" or "This is the bad guy way". Basically they spoon feed you the "correct" interpretations of the characters actions instead of leaving it up to you to interpret what happened and why yourself.

As an aside, pet peeve here - it seems with every subsequent Bioware game they make the "bad guy" routes less "bad". Pretty soon you will have two options, "Good guy" and "Slightly naughty guy". I really don't understand where they're heading these days. It seems like they believe that spunky elf homo-sex is really transgressive (Hey guys, it's 2015 - it's not shocking) but in terms of moral quandaries there's never anything more challenging than "What obvious bad guy do I smack next?"

Anyway, back on topic -

I think there's a substantive difference in the gameplay between the two. The Witcher feels more like an "RPG" because of the more open nature of the exploration and world. Dragon Age: Inquisition felt more like a theme park MMO (it actually uses a lot of contrivances from MMO's in general, but that's a digression for another post). Someone before me said that there is less to do in the Witcher than there is in Dragon Age: Inquisition. That may actually be true, however I would put forth that many of the things "to do" in DA: I are essentially busy work, exactly like how you would find in an MMO "Go forth and kill rats, bring me 10 of their tails and I will reward you with 23 copper pieces, a cloth sack, a loaf of bread and the faction reward that will allow you to progress the story."

Finally, there's the combat and magic systems. Personally, I prefer the Witchers (particularly the Dark difficulty setting) to Dragon Age. Dragon Age's combat has never been all that great, but while DA: 2's combat was complete and utter shit, DA: I's combat is only marginally better (and STILL not as good as Origins). Considering a significant portion of your time is spent fighting enemies in both games, this is a pretty big deal. I'll put it this way - if people are honest with themselves, they could probably close their eyes and win most of Dragon Age's encounters by just mashing buttons. That doesn't fly in Geralt's world and yes, I really like that.

When I stack up these two series side by side I feel very strongly that Dragon Age peaked with the first game. Origin wasn't perfect and it was built on a buggy ported NWN engine, but it had character and treated the player like an adult. However each subsequent release in the series has been worse than the first game. Alternatively, I feel like the Witcher as a series has just kept getting better and better - the world keeps growing, the writing gets more indepth and the combat keeps getting refined and improved. Basically, CD-PR keeps doing pretty much everything right and they keep improving. Bioware on the other hand absolutely seems like a studio in decline and it's showing in their products.

 

[Nimzabaat]

snip.

Just so you know... The Witcher 3 is a lot bigger with less to do. If you felt the Hinterlands was boring, you haven't seen Velen. It's the first game where you really need a horse or fast travel because content is pretty scarce and far apart. It's not like Skyrim where you can walk for a couple minutes and stumble on something to do. Also, aside from a few stand out quests (which really stand out though), the Witcher contracts and side content is pretty much all the same. TW3 feels a lot like something that the Inquisitor would just get someone else to do (a professional monster hunter perhaps?). Think of it as DAI is the Avengers, TW3 is Daredevil (Netflix version). Both are really good in their own way, but one has a bigger budget and it shows.

I think we at the Escapist want to feel that DAI failed because of the massive anti-AAA bias here. I mean in this thread alone we're pretending that Bioware's top selling title with tons of accolades was, in some way, a failure. I mean, I know this is supposed to be an escape from reality but... reality has cookies.

Don't get me wrong, the Witcher 3 is an awesome game... for a non AAA company. So like the Souls series it gets a pass on things that would be torn apart otherwise.

More gratuitous nudity than every Bioware title combined? Unacceptable from a AAA but it makes TW3 "mature".
More glitches than a Bethesda title? Unacceptable from a AAA but it makes TW3 "charming"?
Rape? Hell, in MGS they caught flack for just mentioning it once.
A bloated and unwieldy inventory system that make Mass Effects (yes the first one) look simplistic? Wouldn't fly from anyone else.

You get the picture.

[small]Okay, who am I kidding? [/small]

Uhm...
I dont know about you, but Velen was packed full of content. And more importantly, QUALITY content. Not filler. The rest of the game is the exact same way.
Not a grind or some shitty little quests, but things that actually had me interested in doing them just because they were interesting and fun.

Also, budget seems to not do much about technology. Crysis 3 had a budget of 67 million. Metro Last Light had about 10 million... apart from animations (that simply cost money to do well) it was Crysis 3's equal and even surpassed it in some ways.
So did STALKER way back in 2007 and 2008.

Accolades mean nothing. Call of Propaganda 12: Something Warfare has them too.
The Escapist loves AAA games just as much as any other site... I guess... *spits in disgust*

Witcher is not AAA due to its budget. But it can deffinitely compare to every single RPG out there, no matter its own budget.

BTW, nudity is not a problem. Witcher handles it well.
It is a lot less buggy than Skyrim on release.
I dont get what the rape is supposed to mean.

And no RPG has a good inventory... at least from the ones I have played. All Bioware and Bethesda ones suck. Only STALKER had a good inventory...

Wait... the small print... what???
Did I fall for it

Okay, Velen had bandit camps, monster dens, Witcher Contracts (talk to witness, use Witcher sense, kill monster, wash rinse repeat), guarded treasure, sunken treasure... all pretty much the same. It had some very notable side quests but there was a shit ton of "filler". In fact, you couldn't get past Velen without grinding the filler. I got stuck on level 4 because I was trying to avoid letting the game get boring. Then I had to grind filler from 4 - 8 just to proceed (thanks for the suggestions from my fellow Escapists by the way). Yeah Velen was about 80% filler and if you consider another generic bandit camp or monster den to be "quality" filler, there's this series called Assassin's Creed which you will absolutely love.

I also don't have a problem with nudity per se (on a side note, did anyone else notice that the Avvar archers in DAI were only wearing body paint? That's decent, casual, nudity that works with their background). I just think it's largely hypocritical that people would crucify Bioware or Ubisoft if they had even half as much nudity in their games as the Witcher does.

Try to think of it this way, if TW3 had been a Ubisoft title, what would people be saying about it? I can tell you this. It wouldn't be a lot of "Ubisoft finally gets it right" comments.

Also... less buggy than Skyrim? Skyrim on the console had one bug that I noticed, it was funny, but it was just one bug. TW3 has so many it's ridiculous. They are patching them which Bethesda didn't do with the one bug (because it was funny they said), but still... I get floating vendors all the time and that shit is usually a PC exclusive.

 

[Mechamorph]

I would believe that one of the factors that contribute to DA Inquisition and 2 being inferior to Origins is simply the loss of vision. There does not seem to be an over-arcing theme or vision that runs through the games anymore. This loss of focus makes the subsequent Dragon Age games a very different beast from the original. Also mechanically it seems to have lost an idea of what the Dragon Age games are supposed to be. Origins was a throwback to old school Bioware RPGs, 2 was a not particularly strong action RPG and Inquisition is a bizarre hybrid of the two that does not quite mesh. Another is the decision by Bioware to remove a certain degree of player agency and continuity from the Dragon Age franchise. The best I got out of 2 was a cameo by my old snarky sidekick who had become king and a few lines in the other cameos by returning characters like Liliana.

The other factors others have mentioned are of course also of critical importance; the suits of EA calling the shots, massive (and possibly ultimately fatal) talent drain and the death of the soul that made Bioware great. The lattermost naturally will be the most mourned, the very best RPG studios all shared that same passion for their own games and the worlds they built or played in. When that spark fades, its very quickly noticeable. Compare the Square Enix of FFVI-FFX and the Square Enix of FFXII-FV or Bioware's work on Mass Effect I and Dragon Age Origins to Mass Effect 3 and DA Inquisition.