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Anyone else playing Dragon Age: Inquisition?
My initial reactions were mixed but more positive than negative. Then I got into a groove that I enjoyed for a few months, although the game had stiff competition (and usually lost) with the Bioshock games. I'm over 70 hours into it now and I have officially put it on the back burner. Beautiful visual presentation, an expansive world with tons to do, solid musical score, but lacking what I want in so many other ways. The menus are very unintuitive, which makes crafting, looting and upgrading a minor chore instead of something I'm excited to do. (This from a guy who LOVES loot and upgrading!!) The voice acting for the main character is so middle of the road and bland, as though they didn't want him to be too nice or too much of a jerk. It's a very vanilla sound that reminds me of the male Shepherd in the Mass Effect games. I'd rather have NO voice for my character so I can at least make the voice sound the way *I* would role-play it in my head or out loud. (That's how I did DA: Origins and had a much more personalized experience as a result.)
Combine this with unpredictable dialogue options that result in saying things in ways I don't want to say them (or sometimes saying nearly the OPPOSITE what I intended to communicate) and the Role play side of the experience has been a complete failure for me. At least in Skyrim, where I am a silent protagonist, I can imagine in my mind that I am any kind of personality I can think up. Bioware seems less interested in letting me truly "role play" and more interested in giving me a "choose your own adventure" to interact with. (One with a very BORING, unemotional leading character.)
Setting the RP stuff aside, the tactical camera is just broken enough to prevent me from playing it like an old Bioware RPG (Baldur's gate, etc.) unless I'm in a tough fight. Outside of that I'm mostly just holding down the attack button until things are dead. (Granted, I'm playing on easy, but any harder and I'd have to use that "less than awesome" tactical cam more often.)
I'm also playing a magic user and find the skill trees pretty uninteresting. In most classic RPGs mages will use a library of spells over the course of their growth. In this game you only have a handful of directly offensive spells that are merely modified in their damage, cooldown or mana usage as the game progresses. There is little sense of discovering new and powerful spells. The animations don't discernably change as your spells become more powerful either. Even Diablo 3, a straight up action rpg, seems to have more variety of spells than Inquisition.
Inquisition is a good game, don't get me wrong. The sound design, exploration and visuals do a lot to take me to another world. And I'm confident I'll finish the game. But unlike skyrim I'm not itching to do every quest I can find. Just enough to level up where I need to be for the story quests. And for now I think I just plain want a different kind of game. Either more of a turn-based (or real-time with pause) RPG experience or an action RPG. I'm doing the latter for now, and am back into Kingdoms Of Amalur reckoning, which actually has some similarities to Inquisition, but provides a far more smooth mechanical experience and VERY satisfying combat, looting, crafting and progression. Sure the story is life-drainingly boring, but at least I can skip all the dialogue and still get a nice summary of each quest and a marker to follow. (Since Inquisition is at least TRYING to create a story-driven experience I feel compelled to follow it.)
Anyone else play Inquisition or Kingdoms Of Amalur Reckoning?
My initial reactions were mixed but more positive than negative. Then I got into a groove that I enjoyed for a few months, although the game had stiff competition (and usually lost) with the Bioshock games. I'm over 70 hours into it now and I have officially put it on the back burner. Beautiful visual presentation, an expansive world with tons to do, solid musical score, but lacking what I want in so many other ways. The menus are very unintuitive, which makes crafting, looting and upgrading a minor chore instead of something I'm excited to do. (This from a guy who LOVES loot and upgrading!!) The voice acting for the main character is so middle of the road and bland, as though they didn't want him to be too nice or too much of a jerk. It's a very vanilla sound that reminds me of the male Shepherd in the Mass Effect games. I'd rather have NO voice for my character so I can at least make the voice sound the way *I* would role-play it in my head or out loud. (That's how I did DA: Origins and had a much more personalized experience as a result.)
Combine this with unpredictable dialogue options that result in saying things in ways I don't want to say them (or sometimes saying nearly the OPPOSITE what I intended to communicate) and the Role play side of the experience has been a complete failure for me. At least in Skyrim, where I am a silent protagonist, I can imagine in my mind that I am any kind of personality I can think up. Bioware seems less interested in letting me truly "role play" and more interested in giving me a "choose your own adventure" to interact with. (One with a very BORING, unemotional leading character.)
Setting the RP stuff aside, the tactical camera is just broken enough to prevent me from playing it like an old Bioware RPG (Baldur's gate, etc.) unless I'm in a tough fight. Outside of that I'm mostly just holding down the attack button until things are dead. (Granted, I'm playing on easy, but any harder and I'd have to use that "less than awesome" tactical cam more often.)
I'm also playing a magic user and find the skill trees pretty uninteresting. In most classic RPGs mages will use a library of spells over the course of their growth. In this game you only have a handful of directly offensive spells that are merely modified in their damage, cooldown or mana usage as the game progresses. There is little sense of discovering new and powerful spells. The animations don't discernably change as your spells become more powerful either. Even Diablo 3, a straight up action rpg, seems to have more variety of spells than Inquisition.
Inquisition is a good game, don't get me wrong. The sound design, exploration and visuals do a lot to take me to another world. And I'm confident I'll finish the game. But unlike skyrim I'm not itching to do every quest I can find. Just enough to level up where I need to be for the story quests. And for now I think I just plain want a different kind of game. Either more of a turn-based (or real-time with pause) RPG experience or an action RPG. I'm doing the latter for now, and am back into Kingdoms Of Amalur reckoning, which actually has some similarities to Inquisition, but provides a far more smooth mechanical experience and VERY satisfying combat, looting, crafting and progression. Sure the story is life-drainingly boring, but at least I can skip all the dialogue and still get a nice summary of each quest and a marker to follow. (Since Inquisition is at least TRYING to create a story-driven experience I feel compelled to follow it.)
Anyone else play Inquisition or Kingdoms Of Amalur Reckoning?
