Dragon Age: Inquisition (Plot Details in Spoilers!)

Skanda_sl said:

Someone kindly remind us about the "reviews" for DA2 please.

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I skipped a bunch of dialogue, didn't finish every sidequest and in general rushed through a lot of areas and it took me ~45 hours to finish. If you do everything in the game it could take that much time, if just for all the walking back and forth through areas. It could also take a lot less if you don't do but the bare minimum sidequests though.

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As for the plot: This isn't the ending to a trilogy like Mass Effect 3. Inquisition, regardless of what their marketing fluff said, isn't an ending at all. It's basically its own story that happens to have some callbacks. The plot is weak because of this. It's just a regular (if epic-sounding) adventure in the Dragon Age world, not the climax. It even has a Marvel-style post-credits stinger for a future plot. it feels decidedly mundane for all the buildup they give it.

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It isn't a bad game although it's very much a Bioware RPG. Lots of doing errends for people, lots of quirky characters with silly dialogue, lots of hamfisted moral choices. There are some pretty likable or interesting characters and there is Sera who I wanted to shoot out of a rocket into the sun. The main plot suffers a bit from its blandness but that isn't entirely its own fault. It was trying to be a regular RPG and not the EPIC ENDING OF A TRILOGY like everything else these days and so it kind of inevitably comes across as a bit flat for it.

The combat is fun although a bit repetitive, as you'd expect. Same problem as DA:O basically where fights got a bit samey after a while. The combat is better than in DA2 and lacks the repeated waves (aside from Fade Gate fights where new enemies teleport in, but even there it's fairly clear where they're coming from) and in general fairly enjoyable. I personally found the Tactical mode kind of worthless but YMMV.

My biggest complaint is that there is very little in the way of actual urban environments. You will spend an absolutely absurd amount of time in various huge wilderness areas dotted with ruins and only a brief period of time anywhere with people. There is a cool mission where you have to attend a fancy party but otherwise there's like one town (which is small and mostly empty), your stronghold and then a few villages here and there. I hope you like dungeons and wilderness because that is what you're getting.

The Multiplayer is basically ME3's multiplayer in Dragon Age. I enjoyed what I got to play of it but I don't feel I got the best experience with it because getting other people to play with was a pain in the ass due to the limited number of copies out there. If it turns out to be as good as ME3's in the later-game, it'll be great, but I just honestly can't tell you.

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It's more like a D&D quest to kill a big bad. I think people who are honestly expecting it to resolve all the plots they left dangling in DAO and DA2 are gonna be disappointed.

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The gameplay is supported by visuals that, to me, weren't particularly impressive. With the processing power of the current generation of consoles and PC's, I saw way too many visual errors in my Inquisition experience. It was truly odd. It was like the character models and environments were from the last generation of consoles, with a fresh veneer of visual effects laid over them. For example, shadows and lighting effects were excellent and functioned near flawlessly, but the character animations were stiff and uninspired, showing detail in some situations and looking lackluster in others.

Add to that screen tearing between cutscenes and gameplay sequences, as well as odd world glitches (I literally saw NPC's falling from the sky to land on their designated spots in the world at several points) and what you have is a game that could have been visually breathtaking, but falls just short.

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