Dragon Age 3: Inquisition announced

[zinfamous]

Spoiler tags escrow, god damn

srsly


and what the hell--I'm hitting 100 hours, and haven't started that 4th? mission ...whatever it is after the big warden castle.

still haven't unlocked one of those initial map options (you get after skyhold)...the 20 power one.

 

[zinfamous]

While crafting is a good way to get good access to nice weapons and armor, I have found nice stuff as drops. I have a 312 DPS greatsword I found as a drop with a lot of bonuses and a rune slot.

i've also had weird results with crafting. Before masterwork, I was crafting stuff with upgrade slots. Then with masterwork, same thing.

Now, I've crafted 3 or 4 armor pieces of different types, and with masterwork--either a master attribute or the %upgrade to master (and success on master), I get no upgrade slots on the gear.

what gives?

 

[zinfamous]

You need to craft stuff. Most of the best stuff if not the best stuff is crafted. You can adjust the appearance based on the materials used. Mostly the color, but some of them look cool. Once you get some good tier 3 weapons and armor schematics you will find you never change it except for crafting it again with new materials for different/better stats.

there's really only 3, or maybe 4 for some types, armor skins in each armor class, total. It's very strange.

I await the mods.

 

[exar333]

srsly


and what the hell--I'm hitting 100 hours, and haven't started that 4th? mission ...whatever it is after the big warden castle.

still haven't unlocked one of those initial map options (you get after skyhold)...the 20 power one.

Lol, same here. At about 70 hours, but the quests from my inner circle are just so cool. The backstories and so forth are time-consuming (in a good way) and I pretty much blew this whole evening on just ones with Sera, Cassandra and Dorian. Had a blast.

I don't think I had this much fun with companion stories since the first KOTOR game.

 

[ControlD]

That apostate cache is in the smuggler's cave, not on top of the mountain (which there is no way to get to). I spent at least 30 minutes on this too haha.

I think I have that one. The one I am having a problem with is near Winterwatch Tower (think that's the name). It did give me a reason to clear out about 12 open quests in the Hinterlands last night, including bagging my first dragon. Heck, I ended up finding an entire section of that map I didn't even know existed!

 

[KeithTalent]

I think I am getting closer to finishing Origins, so do I have to playe Dragon Age 2 before playing playing part3?

KT

 

[ControlD]

I think I am getting closer to finishing Origins, so do I have to playe Dragon Age 2 before playing playing part3?

KT

Not really. I was actually playing DA2 when the new game came out, and despite my best efforts at waiting until I finished DA2 I started playing Inquisition and got sucked in. I don't feel like I missed too much.

 

[davie jambo]

I think I have that one. The one I am having a problem with is near Winterwatch Tower (think that's the name). It did give me a reason to clear out about 12 open quests in the Hinterlands last night, including bagging my first dragon. Heck, I ended up finding an entire section of that map I didn't even know existed!

I've been stuck on that apostate quest too !

 

[Dahak]

I think I am getting closer to finishing Origins, so do I have to playe Dragon Age 2 before playing playing part3?

KT

Personally I would say yes, but then I like playing all the games in a series for the lore and background.

But I would say the major bits from two that seems to carry over is, this stuff is not spoilery
1) Varric - companion in both, will get more background info on him
2) Red Lyrium - introduction to it.
3) See more friction and the start of the Mage/Templar war

Spoiler One
4)

Spoiler

First meet Corypheus in the

Legacy DLC

 

[zinfamous]

I think I am getting closer to finishing Origins, so do I have to playe Dragon Age 2 before playing playing part3?

KT

I never played DA2. I feel as though I missed nothing

 

[KeithTalent]

Cool, thanks. Sounds like I can just go ahead with the new one when I finish Origins.

KT

 

[cmdrdredd]

There is a default world state or you can create your own. Even if you don't create your own through dragon age keep, it feels fine with the default.

 

[Udgnim]

I never played DA2. I feel as though I missed nothing

DA:I story relates to DA2

I never played DA2 so I'm not sure what I'm missing

talking to characters in DA:I helps flesh some things out about what happened in DA2 though

 

[Red Hawk]

Yeah the storyline of each Dragon Age game is technically separate, so you don't have to play the prior games like you had to with the the Mass Effect games. Still, decisions, characters, and event from both past games do influence Dragon Age Inquisition, so it's best to play them all. But overall you're not at a terrible disadvantage if you skip DA2.

 

[zinfamous]

DA:I story relates to DA2

I never played DA2 so I'm not sure what I'm missing

talking to characters in DA:I helps flesh some things out about what happened in DA2 though

yeah, it's definitely related and I know there are some story elements that are missing, but I feel like I can piece enough of it together to continue with what matters in the current game.

Frankly, I've heard such endless horror stories about DA2 that I never had any real desire to play it.

 

[StinkyPinky]

yeah, it's definitely related and I know there are some story elements that are missing, but I feel like I can piece enough of it together to continue with what matters in the current game.

Frankly, I've heard such endless horror stories about DA2 that I never had any real desire to play it.

Dragon Age 2 was fun, just very limited in scope both plot wise and in terms of world events (In the first game you're saving the world, the second game a single middling city, the third game the world again...). It also refused maps like nobodies business.

 

[bystander36]

Dragon Age 2 really wasn't a bad game. In some ways it was better than Origins, but there were a couple things that really pissed off some people. 1) Only the hero had gear real gear to swap out. All the others just had upgrade slots, which you had no control over. 2) Many of the zones were just duplicates with different doors closed off. It really felt like they just cut a lot of corners here. And some people didn't like the story that much, though others did. It wasn't as epic in story as the first one, or Inquisition.

My advice is to play it, but only after you taken a break from Origins for at least 1-2 months. That way you don't compare them quite as critically. But many of the elements on DA 2 were good. The combat was good, they balanced the mage class, they made combos cross class and not all with mages.

If DA Origins had not existed, more people would have liked DA 2.

 

[zinfamous]

Dragon Age 2 really wasn't a bad game. In some ways it was better than Origins, but there were a couple things that really pissed off some people. 1) Only the hero had gear real gear to swap out. All the others just had upgrade slots, which you had no control over. 2) Many of the zones were just duplicates with different doors closed off. It really felt like they just cut a lot of corners here. .

These things are important to me, and are exactly why I don't want to touch it. It would annoy me to no end.

It sounds more Mass Effect than DA.

I thoroughly enjoyed Mass Effect 1, and was a bit put-off by ME 2, so never touched ME 3. DA2 always sounded like ME 2 to me, so I don't want to waste my time on that one.

 

[Zenoth]

I still always recommend DA2. It connects well with Inquisition, especially considering that Hawke plays a significant role in Inquisition as well. If you role-play DA2 to any degree enough to become "attached" to your Hawke, it makes his/her appearance and his/her role in Inquisition all that more satisfying and fulfilling. I personally thought that it was one of the major point of Inquisition (I've finished it recently).

And DA2 isn't a lengthy game anyway, you'd finish it in maybe 30 to 35 hours. It's also well structured. I like that it works by "chapters", and like the concept of having the game's events occur over a period of seven years (I think it's seven? I can't recall by heart, maybe closer to a decade if not). The only obvious problem is of course that since DA2 was rushed BioWare didn't have much time to work on actual varied environments, so about 85% of the game happens within Kirkwall (the few maps we do have are often re-used and game assets can be seen almost everywhere, visual variety took a great hit because of that).

Still, I always admired BioWare for being able to actually make DA2 the game it ended up being with essentially not even two years of development (Nov. 2009 was Origins' release, then comes along the sequel of such a masterpiece already out by March 2011? Yeah, right. No sorry, won't happen, you can't have the sequel of something like Origins in not even two years, forget about that, now that Inquisition is out people still think that it should have been worked on for another year or two, so yeah). Anyway, now that Inquisition is out DA2 can be enjoyed more for what it is, instead of being hated because it isn't what it "should have been". It's a decent parenthesis, an interim before playing Inquisition.

 

[Mem]

Cool, thanks. Sounds like I can just go ahead with the new one when I finish Origins.

KT

Some advantages to playing DA2 before DA:I,

First reason:Some characters in DA2 appear in DA:I(you can have some in your group) and no spoilers from me.

Second reason: Can be found pretty cheap.

Third reason: DA:I needs a few patches which Bioware are working on right now,I hear first is in QA testing so by time you finish DA2,DA:I should be patched up and there are some serious game bugs from no sound chat banter(there is a work around here http://forum.bioware.com/topic/528018-party-banter/ )to cut scenes freezing, controls etc..

Fourth: It gives both Nvidia and AMD time to get newer better drivers out for DA:I.
Btw DA2 is a lot shorter then DAO so should not take you long to finish DA2.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Some advantages to playing DA2 before DA:I,

First reason:Some characters in DA2 appear in DA:I(you can have some in your group) and no spoilers from me.

Second reason: Can be found pretty cheap.

Third reason: DA:I needs a few patches which Bioware are working on right now,I hear first is in QA testing so by time you finish DA2,DA:I should be patched up and there are some serious game bugs from no sound chat banter to controls etc..

Fourth: It gives both Nvidia and AMD time to get newer better drivers out for DA:I.
Btw DA2 is a lot shorter then DAO so should not take you long to finish DA2.

All interesting points. I have not had the party banter bug though. Although new drivers would not hurt. I do get occasional texture flashing.

 

[Dumac]

I disagree with the last few posters. I found DA2 to be unfinishable. After tortuing myself for 15 or so hours, I gave up partway through Act 3 (I believe the that's the final act). As a whole, I didn't really enjoy the experience or recommend it to anybody else.

From my view, DA2 had a whole slew of flaws. There are the obvious and mostly agreed upon ones such as repetitive assets, magically spawning enemies, inventory, and companion customization. I personally found a few more flaws.

I thought the combat, which is core to the game, was extreme underwhelming. During an interview, one dev said that he wants players to feel like "when they press A, something awesome happens", which I think says a lot about how the combat turned it. There were a lot of flashy and over-the-top abilities, but they way there were implemented disincentivized tactics at the expense of making cool Michael-Bay like effects. Characters were zipping around the battle field, doing flips, and causing earthquakes. Any ideas of formations or group tactics went out the window.

The side quests were completely mundane. There was no thought to them. They were even simpler than MMO colelction quests. Not to mention the times where you would find a random object in a cave, somehow omnisciently know who it belongs to, and then give it to them with no backstory or dialogue.

The main quest was rife with terrible pacing. In the beginning

Spoiler

there is an extremely dramatic death scene about a character you just met. Why would I care? I don't even know this character. Not to mention, if you manage to 'avoid' the death, that character just becomes a Grey Warden and disappears anyway. Such an illusion of choice.

When time 'skips' forward, I don't really feel like it does because the character haven't really changed. Supposedly you were meant to gain influence in the town, but you never really do. You just maintain the course of 'fetch quest slave' as the world continues to mostly ignore you. The weak soundtrack really showed during the main quests, as none of them were backed by meaningful music.

The main quest also really never gave you any real choice. I kept wanting to do certain obvious actions, but the game never allowed me to. DA:O offered the player a lot more agency.

Kirkwall never felt alive as a city, despite you spending 90% of the game there. It was an extreme shallow representation of a city, and barely changed over time skips. The town was also mostly barren, unlike games like The Witcher, Dragon's Dogma, etc.

The inclusion of the dialogue wheel from ME was a huge flaw in my opinion. It not only constricts the number of options as well as masks what your options really mean due to ambiguous line summaries, but the dialogue wheel reinforces token answers and dissuades the writing of interesting dialogue options. You are stuck with generic 'good' option in the top left, generic 'neutral ' or 'comedic' option int he middle right, generic 'bad' option in the bottom right, and then 1-3 auxiliary (usually meaningless useless) options on the left. DA:O gave you a lot more diversity in choice.

Voice acting, also taken from ME, was another huge flaw for me. Voice acting reduces the number of dialogue options from a pure budget perspective. This probably contributed to the lack of dialogue options mentioned above. Not only that, but I found Hawke's voice acting in particular to be grating. His answers were too emphatically acted, so they didn't flow well together. Just listening to the dialogue, my character would go from extremely cheery, to so angry he could barely hold it in, to laughing hysterically over 3 options.

The graphics were poor, especially when compared to Witcher 2 which released around the same time. In many places, the graphics were worse than DA:O. A dev described this as a 'hot rod' style, but really they were just trying to cover up how little effort went into the graphics.

As for improvements, there is one. The skill tree I think was more interestingly shaped than the skill 'branches' from DA:O. However, the skills themselves were less interesting.

Overall, I thought DA2 was a sub par game (4/10). I would not recommend it for even $5, as I didn't really have an enjoyable experience with it. Just thought I'd throw my .02 in there.

 

[bystander36]

If you didn't like DA2 combat, how do you like Inquisition? Inquisition is almost an exact copy of DA2, so I assume you also hate DA:I. And your dialog choices, must also be hated in Inquisition? There isn't hardly any difference between the two.

DA:I is more like DA2 than Origins, except in that it is more polished like Origins.

 

[Dumac]

If you didn't like DA2 combat, how do you like Inquisition? Inquisition is almost an exact copy of DA2, so I assume you also hate DA:I. And your dialog choices, must also be hated in Inquisition? There isn't hardly any difference between the two.

DA:I is more like DA2 than Origins, except in that it is more polished like Origins.

I haven't played DA:I yet - I was worried it would be another DA2. I'm waiting a couple of months for communal opinion to settle, and then I'll go search out opinion that I feel I would potentially agree with.

The things you say don't make it sound that promising

 

[bystander36]

I haven't played DA:I yet - I was worried it would be another DA2. I'm waiting a couple of months for communal opinion to settle, and then I'll go search out opinion that I feel I would potentially agree with.

The things you say don't make it sound that promising

The thing is, I have my doubts you really would dislike DA:I, if you give it a chance. A lot of people can get the mind set that if a game is bad, everything about it is bad. DA:I works, even if you thought those things sucked in DA2.

Sometimes it is simply a matter of expecting DA:Origins, and when things change, you are upset, but given time to adapt, you can appreciate the new ways of doing things.

My advice is simply to look at DA:I as a new game, and not a sequel. As a sequel, people have expectations, but as a stand alone game, you can accept it, and enjoy it.