lobotomy42

http://www.gamecritics.com/brad-gallaway/dragon-age-inquisition-preview-an-errand-girl-for-the-kingdom More Skyrimization confirmed. *sigh*

sounds just plain wrong. Or does DA:I actually use D&D ruleset? That would be a big surprise for me... /confused I think they just mean generic high fantasy crap.

This is somewhat worrying: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/dragon-age-inquisition-preview

I have to say, the Skyrim-ization of Thedas is the part of this game I'm least looking forward to.

While we're talking about skills, was it really necessary to have both "lock-picking" and "safe-cracking?"

As much as I like the stamina/health dichotomy on paper, it seems to be just one-more-thing-to-keep-track-of in practice. Health plus injuries seems simpler and more intuitive.

So your answer to that is to get rid of arrows? Yes. Any benefits you get from specific arrows types can just be handled by abilities. So you mean rangers can imbue arrows with fire or acid damage or easier stuff like clicking on add +5 to these arrows I am about to fire off. Either. Both. Anything is better than carrying around 21 fire arrows which I will never use because I am constantly waiting for the perfect opportunity to use them, which never comes because I don't realize it until too late.

So your answer to that is to get rid of arrows? Yes. Any benefits you get from specific arrows types can just be handled by abilities.

Stocking up on arrows was one of the most inventory-cluttering aspects of the IE games. Good riddance.

I just tried playing for a few hours with a ranger. It was not a fantastic experience. Here is what I noticed: PoE throws a lot of stats at you right away, and gives you very little information on what choices are good or bad. The goal is that there are no "bad choices" but clearly that is not the case. The town and character models all look good. The background looks great. The UI is a little compressed. The ability icons in particular are very small and hard to distinguish from each other. And heaven help the wizard and priest whose abilities are further tucked behind the "I/II/III" menus The font in the combat window is too big, everything scrolls out of view very quickly. Also, changing the text contents when you hover over items in this window makes scrolling with the mousewheel very difficult. When I have the whole party selected and click on someone to talk, a different party member approaches the NPC every time. Why? Is it always assumed that my PC is talking, or do different characters have different conversational abilities? And if the latter, why can't I set a "party leader" to do the talking? Combat is insanely confusing. The box helps a little, but it's still overwhelming for me, and I'm not new to RPGs. My party died almost immediately on the first encounter, and I had to switch to "Slow" mode to figure out what was going on. In general, there are a lot of abilities that seem like slight variations of each other, which makes it hard to keep track. My ranger character was awful, partially because I didn't give him enough Dex to hit anything, but partially because he spent the majority of his time reloading his weapon. Which attribute governs reload speed and why don't the other classes have to reload? I assume you know this already, but there is no quick save or quick load that I could see. There should be an option to adjust the window and arrow key scrolling speeds. When selecting a unit, it needs to be clear visually what the unit is currently trying to do (or about to do.) Currently the icon distinguishes between attacking, moving or using an ability, but it doesn't make the target clear. Targeting units hidden behind other units is very difficult. The isomorphic perspective seems much closer to the ground, somehow, than IE games. Making healing and other buff spells AOE is slightly confusing - do the stamina recovery spells affect enemies, too? I miss the ability from IE to have the healer target healing spells on other party members by click on the UI icon of the character rather than the actual character's avatar. I really hope the final game has some kind of tutorial for the battle system that starts you out with 2-3 characters against 2 enemies, because starting 6 on 6 is overwhelming.

It's just a fan-made trailer, guys. Someone took some publicly available footage and threw some generic "epic" music behind it. Not from Bioware.

Yeah, the more they show of this game, the more my enthusiasm is cooling. It definitely seems that Bioware is going aggressively after the Skyrim audience - the way conversations are handled, the resource farming, the mounts, the emphasis on dragon fights. None of this is necessarily bad, per se, but I don't think the reason people didn't like Dragon Age 2 was lack of mounts. It's so difficult to tell what has or has not actually been improved based on the gameplay videos they've shown. On the one hand, it feels like they've shown a lot. On the other hand, I still have no sense of whether the moment-to-moment combat feels substantially different from Dragon Age 2. Throwing around buzzwords like "consequences" is not actually that informative.

I think that when people assume that a corporate entity has an "attitude", they'll end up in the wrong simply because a corporation is not alive even though it behaves as a living thing. The great Leviathan and as one, made of people who are ultimately who decide and influence said attitude. Without being privy to the internal culture inside BW all we can do is speculate. If I had to point something out it would be the thematic differences in their works, BW has become more about the romances/companion based narrative driven games and Obs keep doing unique RPGs and being awesome at it. Yeah, like World of Tanks. Honestly, I'd like nothing more than for you to be right, but doesn't look like it. Full disclosure: FONV is still the latest Obsidian game I've bought. I have more hours and playthroughs in Alpha Protocol than I have in almost any other game (certainly more than any other non-Bioware game, perhaps apart from Red Alert 2), but I've been feeling a bit left out hanging by their recent work. I have an acute fear that Obsidian is either a) in a crisis b) has lost their way, but there is still Eternity to look forward to. I'm still astounded by the amount of people with a jilted lover syndrome towards Bioware who come to this forum in a seeming competition of who can come up with the most over-the-top bull**** whine for Bioware. "Attitude"'s going to be pretty hard to beat, though. Bioware successfully transitioned from their PC RPG roots into a AAA studio. Obsidian, like many other former mid-tier studios, did not quite. The market now has no mid-tier - you can make indie games on Kickstarter, you can make mobile F2P games, or you can be one of a dwindling number of AAA studios. The poor reception of Alpha Protocol and Dungeon Siege III seems to have knocked Obsidian out of the AAA space for the moment. Hopefully they'll recover! I'm excited for Eternity, but would much rather see them return to big AAA RPG productions. For all the **** people (including myself) give Bioware, for as awkward as their romances and dialogue are, for being as...well, as Bioware as they are -- I still look forward to playing their games on release. My mind is tickled by Avellone's dialogue, but my trigger fingers are kept satisfied by Bioware's Awesome Buttons. I've replayed almost every post-Kotor Bioware game I've completed. The only Obsidian game I've ever felt the desire to go back and replay was Kotor 2. This isn't a knock on Obsidian, whose games are always distinct and often excellent. But I don't think Bioware was foolish to sacrifice some of the "RPG-ness" of their RPGs in order to obtain more visceral gameplay and a more cinematic, polished presentation. There is something compellingly playable about them. Every new Bioware RPG makes me roll my eyes, but on the other hand I clearly enjoy playing them and rolling my eyes at it along the way. I can only assume that some of the people in this forum who just *love to complain about Bioware* feel similarly.

...That's just the sort of thing an Evil person would say!

I noticed that, too. I'm trying to remember if the previous Dragon Age games used seemingly "anachronistic" language like that? (Obviously, it's a fantasy universe so nothing is literally anachronistic.) I definitely remember that in Dragon Age 2 Isabela definitely made some references that seemed out of place ("Handcuffs, whipped cream") given the setting. And Alistair's dialogue always had a certain snarkiness in tone that came across as a bit modern, although that still strikes me as much more believable than a Qunari saying "weird-ass" anything. It's possible that Bioware has just thrown up their hands and decided that all bets are off at this point and whatever dialogue sounds the most "cool" is in, coherency be damned. Freddie seems nice enough.

I really want a game set in Evil Slaver Blood Mage Empire, but on a second thought, I can kind of understand why Bioware doesn't want to open the can of worms that portraying the human sacrifice-y-mindrape-y slavers as protagonists would mean. Believe me, I understand *why* they didn't. I'm just saying that the companion tension would have gotten a lot more real, maybe even eliminating the possibility for a merry-band-of-warriors feeling. EDIT: Although now I'm kind of laughing trying to imagine Bioware's marketing department coming up with cute Whedonesque quotes to tweet out to its followers for such a character.

I'm more annoyed that we're getting yet another Tevinter Imperium character who has nothing but disdain for the Tevinter Imperium and its practices. I'd be more interested in an honest full-throated supporter of the Tevinter Imperium. It'd be difficult to sell, but would lead to much more interesting conflicts between the characters, I'd imagine.

They have a tactical advantage, too, in that developers there grew up in a culture that is broadly similar* to that of Western markets, but also the cost of living is generally much cheaper than the other countries with major game development industries: US, UK, France, Japan. So you can sell your game at U.S. prices but pay your employees Poland salaries. Ergo, more game for us! Between that and the fact that they're essentially independent, I honestly think that explains a lot of their ability to execute as well on their games as they do.

Still sounds better than the DAO console versions, so Imma gonna wait for someone to get to play with the actual pc controls before I jump to the same conclusions... True Story: I originally played Dragon Age: Origins on an Xbox 360, and only very recently have gone back and played through it on PC. I like the console controls better. Playing on PC from the tactical view, combat is certainly much easier. I can keep track of my party members better, use traps and spells in a real way, and do a little bit of strategic positioning. But ultimately, I find myself comparing the experience (in my mind) more to Baldur's Gate than I do to Dragon Age on consoles. And it's often an unfavorable comparison. I'm constantly frustrated by my inability to move the camera away from the currently selected character, and my companions insistence on disobeying my orders almost immediately after I switch characters. The critique in my head is "Why is this so limited in comparison to Baldur's Gate?" Whereas, when I play on the Xbox 360, it's true that combat is now "harder" in ways that are unsatisfying, but even so, it's a more fun and ...shall we say, casual experience. Honestly, that's where Bioware feels more comfortable at this point, and I don't think it's a bad direction. TL;DR - I'm glad Inquisition has a tactical camera, but I'm not getting my expectations too high about it being any more flexible than the one in Origins.

Touche.

Yeah, I've never really understood why everyone hates DLC so much. If you don't think the extra content is worth the money....don't buy it! And if you think the game is somehow incomplete without it (which is almost never true) then don't buy the game! The reason publishers moved towards DLC is because game costs are rising and they can't just increase prices on games without cutting into sales. So DLC provides a way for them to get more money from the "uber-fans" who don't mind paying an extra $10-15 for a slightly-larger game. Yes, this means that the price-per-gameplay-hour of DLC is usually much higher than that of the main game, but again, if that bothers you, don't buy it. Or wait two years and buy the inevitable "ULTIMATE GOTY FINAL EDITION" for $25.

This is nothing new, marketing always focuses on the shallowest parts. Do you guys even remember the campaign for Mass Effect 2? http://gematsu.com/2010/01/mass-effect-2-posters-decorate-california

Well, let's be fair. You can thank Obsidian for introducing that particular innovation in Kotor 2 and NWN 2.

Yeah, I'm not sure why this is seen as a step forward other than making the game arbitrarily more "hardcore." Wasn't it Avellone or Sawyer who pointed out that drinking a health potion when your health is low is neither difficult nor tactically interesting? To me, this should go into the dustbin of RPG features, along with "pre-buffing."

You know, in Orlais, they call it Ferelden-kissing.