Dragon Age: Inquisition

[Orogun01]

 

I found ME1 to have the best combat of the 3. Less corridors, better use of terrain and more "convincing" physics in the way biotics were used. It wasn't open world, but it gave a greater sense of freedom when fighting. Probably just as well I completed it last, otherwise I would have been very disappointed with combat in ME2 (in particular) and to a lesser degree ME3.

 

Similar feelings around DA:O and DA2 where the latter feels a lot more restrictive and "smaller" in scale.

 

ME2 had better combat imo because it was more responsive and frankly lifted the cover mechanic from GOW that it needed. Great combat. But ME1 is the better game.

 

I don't know if I can enjoy the wack a mole style of ME2, to be honest I thought that ME3 did a better job of creating a more dynamic cover environment so you weren't restricted to a stationary strategy.

[ShadySands]

ME1 was the only one I didn't finish

 

ME2 I played and enjoyed the most (until the baby reaper, that was a head scratcher)

 

ME3 I mostly enjoyed except for the Kai Leng bits and the last hour or so. What can I say, I liked putting the band back together

Edited August 29, 2013 by ShadySands

[Nepenthe]

The only thing I missed from ME1 in the later games was the Mako.

 

Oh, and the Spectre weapons! :D

[TrashMan]

ME1 was the best - best gameplay, story and atmosphere.

[aries101]

 

the plot/story in DA2, Hawke's personal story.

People didn't complaint about Hawke's personal story. Or at least, that wasn't the meat of most complaints I heard.

 

They complained that the entire last act was on rails and the bad guys dropped philosophical differences for pure crazy. People actually liked the Qunari plot. But the personal plot was just a narrative McGuffin. Something you followed to get hooked into the real plots.

 

I mean, the personal story stops being relevant even halfway into the game. Of the three major plot threads, two of them were save the world. And one of those fails simply because the city of Kirkwall is full of crazy people.

 

 

 

When has there been a BIoware game in which the last part of the game, the end game, wasn't on rails? None - at least noone that I can remember. Even in BG1 you became locked down at a certain point in the story and you need to defeat the bad guy (Sarevok). Bioware games are telling stories, and as we know a story needs a beginning, a middle and an ending. People complaining about the entire last act being on rails may have thought that this game were an rpg like Oblivion or Skyrim! Or maybe they wanted DA2 to be just like Oblivion or Skyrim.

 

I, for one, like DA2. It is a much better game that some people give it credit for. The design ideas were great; the execution of them certainly not. I'm, as I stated in my latest post, not blind to the flaws of DA2; the wave combat, the enemies appearing out of thin air etc. etc. My point just being this: if you play NWN1, and ICWD2 (which I have recently), you'll see just how game development has developed since 2001/2002 - for the better, imo. Re-used areas a lot, enemies attacking you to the moment you land in a new part of the (world) map, enemies also popping out of the ground etc. etc. The characters in DA2 were great; they were distinct and certainly memorable.

 

Many people, including me, play Bioware games for the story, the characters, and yes, some play them also because of the romances. Other people play (bioware) games, rpgs, because of the gameplayand the ability to micromanage everyting, including the inventory. I, for one, liked the neat inventory in DA2. Much better than the one in DA:O and much much better than the one in ICWD2. I hate having to spend like 2 hours selling stuff etc. etc. Bioware games have hardly ever been about the gameplay...

[Guest Slinky]

 

This sounds like an improvement:

 

"Previously, we had a lot of the follower content gated by your approval rating. Whereas what we're doing now, we're having a lot more of your content event-driven," Gaider says. "The approval you're at informs the nature of the conversation."

 

That means you shouldn't have to agree on everything to befriend or romance another character. "They're like, 'Yes, you've chosen a thing that I disagree with, but we're good friends,'" Laidlaw says. "So that's going to change the color and tone of [those interactions], so [they're] more nuanced. I think that's going to take them beyond what's been done in the past."

 

Those clandestine agents are going to initiate 'Dragon Protocol'?

 

That would be most welcome. Kissing everyone's ass the whole game isn't exactly fun way to get to all npc content. And that's exactly what my explore/see all OCD makes me do.

 

Edit: And all you maniacs who think ME1 had the best combat, you really enjoyed the horrible fire twice and the reticle is big as deathstar system? I didn't like the combat till the end side of the game, when you started to have guns that actually hit where you aimed.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Slinky

[HoonDing]

Inquisitors don't kiss ass, they brand ass.

[Bos_hybrid]

The idea of the dragon keep is a good one.

 

So can we expect The Citadel for the ME series? Or just a RGB slide.

[TrashMan]

 

Edit: And all you maniacs who think ME1 had the best combat, you really enjoyed the horrible fire twice and the reticle is big as deathstar system? I didn't like the combat till the end side of the game, when you started to have guns that actually hit where you aimed.

 

 

 

Question 1: did you ever shoot an AR in full auto?

 

Question 2: Do you know hte average number of spent bullets per confirmed kill ratio in the US army?

[Guest Slinky]

Answer 1: Eh, yeah, during end side of the game, since then you actually had assault rifles that, you know, didn't go jupiter-sized reticle after the first two shots.

 

Edit: Or did you mean in real life? Yes I have actually. That said, there is still often a difference between realism and fun in game.

 

Answer 2: No, and in all honesty I don't particularly care. You saying ME1 is somekind of Space Operation Flashpoint?

Edited August 29, 2013 by Slinky

[Maria Caliban]

Mass Effect happens 170 years in the future. Why would their guns have the same level of accuracy as a modern firearm?

 

Now for some Dragon Age news!

 

. This was shown at GamesCom. Looks like someone filmed it with a camera as it's rather washed out.

[Monte Carlo]

 

 

Edit: And all you maniacs who think ME1 had the best combat, you really enjoyed the horrible fire twice and the reticle is big as deathstar system? I didn't like the combat till the end side of the game, when you started to have guns that actually hit where you aimed.

 

 

 

Question 1: did you ever shoot an AR in full auto?

 

Question 2: Do you know hte average number of spent bullets per confirmed kill ratio in the US army?

 

 

 

Hmmm. Am on difficult ground here as (1) I've not payed Mass Effect and (2) am not convinced that CRPGs (as opposed to MilSims like Arma) need to have hyper-realistic firearms / weapons modelling.

 

* But *

 

I've fired a shed-load of small arms (and not-so-small-arms) on automatic. Yep, you don't hit much. Which leads me to Q2. Amount of rounds fired versus kills is utterly Point Not Found. Infantrymen try to win the firefight. This means saturating the enemy location with fire to keep his head down so you can advance / flank / bring support weapons to bear. As long as you win the firefight it matters not how many kills you get. In fact, if you put down 5,000 rounds of MG and rifle fire and kill nobody, but pin the enemy for long enough to kill him with fast air then it's a massive tick in the 'Win' column.

 

I hope that makes sense. The only rounds fired / kill ratio that means squat in a military context are those fired by a sniper, a military specialism.

 

170 years from now I'd expect firearms still to fire slugs. Almost certainly caseless, maybe in the 6-7mm range and using weapons that utilize electricity and have relatively few moving parts. An Advanced Combat Rifle might well have a large capacity magazine of 100+ rounds with a wide choice of sub-munitions. I think that 'ray guns' and 'lasers' are many years on from that because your personal weapon is always made by the lowest bidder (qv Murphy's Laws of Combat).

[BruceVC]

Mass Effect happens 170 years in the future. Why would their guns have the same level of accuracy as a modern firearm?

 

Now for some Dragon Age news!

 

Short Environment Video. This was shown at GamesCom. Looks like someone filmed it with a camera as it's rather washed out.

 

Holy Smoke that looks amazing !!!!

[Tale]

Though shooters are not my preferred genre, I don't really know of any other game with the different classes and abilities that ME2/ME3 offers and the corresponding change in gameplay.

Games derived from the Team Fortress model beat it out rather handily. Whether that be Team Fortress itself or Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. If you break out of the Call of Duty and Halo spheres you'll find lots of that. Natural Selection has lots of playstyles. And these games actually have movement abilities, not just variations on attacks. With environments that make use of it.

 

Still, I liked ME2's combat. I think ME3's expansion of powers kind of homogenized classes a bit outside of Vanguard, and the enemy designs did nothing to play with what differences remained.

 

When has there been a BIoware game in which the last part of the game, the end game, wasn't on rails? None - at least noone that I can remember. Even in BG1 you became locked down at a certain point in the story and you need to defeat the bad guy (Sarevok). Bioware games are telling stories, and as we know a story needs a beginning, a middle and an ending. People complaining about the entire last act being on rails may have thought that this game were an rpg like Oblivion or Skyrim! Or maybe they wanted DA2 to be just like Oblivion or Skyrim.

Complaints of rails usually are due to the rails being visible, not the rails existing. As in the player has lost all motivation for following the main plot and that's when they notice they're not allowed to do anything else.

[Sarex]

Mass Effect happens 170 years in the future. Why would their guns have the same level of accuracy as a modern firearm?

 

 

ME1 guns all had recoil, so be they future guns or not, they worked on the same principle. ME1 had a more complex gameplay design, which was fun to a lot of people including me, ME2/3 stream lined all that out and what you got was a generic shooter. It's basically the same thing people complained about in DA:O, that it was nowhere near as complex as BG.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Sarex

[anubite]

Volourn, I know you're a troll half the time, and yes, I know, sub 20 fighters in BG series have few active abilities, but that doesn't change the potential complexity.

 

Let's compare BG2 DAO and DA2, just on the PC level:

 

Human

Elf

Helf

Gnome
Halfing

Dwarf

HOrc

 

Fighter

Ranger

Paladin

Barbarian

Cleric

Druid

Mage

Sorcerer

Thief

Bard

Monk

 

3 kits per class on avg

 

3 moralities at least (some classes can have any one of the 9 alignments, but a lot of classes are restricted)

 

races * classes * kits 

7 * 11 * 3 * 3= 693

 

If you're a mage, you have your starting spells, which add complexity, but not all that much, so we'll just ignore it. But every single one of those starting character choices matters. Your starting alignment effects your Bhaal spells and other ****, class kits are influential, as is your race and class. I'm not even going to add in complexity by counting the number of ways you can arrange your starting attributes.

 

DAO:

 

Race: 3

Class: 3

Origin: 5*

 

*Not really five, every race->class choice limits you to as few as one origins (mages have one origin, most other have between 2 to 3). If I'm generous, I'll say 3 chocies for every class combination

 

3*3*3 = 27

 

DA2 starting complexity?

 

3

 

 

So, again, let's compare:

 

693

27

3

 

Numbers don't lie. Now, you might be tempted to say, "But waait a minute! Warriors and rogues have active/spam abilities in DAO/DA2, and what about leveling up in general? Those games might be more complex after level 1!"

 

If you really don't believe me, I can do the combinatorics to show BG2 > DA:O > DA2 in terms of end-game character complexity. I haven't done the math, but I think BG is also > DA:O and DA2 in terms of end-game complexity.

 

If we talk strictly in terms of possible combinations, builds, etc BG/BG2 are more complex in character creation and advancement and offer strictly more options for players. Many of these options aren't illusory (while I would go so far as to say many of DA2's talent trees offer illusory choices or offer zero impact at level up, one example that comes to mind is Varric's talent tree, where you have a choice between 3 persistent abilities that you cannot have all active at once, yet you must purchase all of them to get the final talent - two of those points at least are worthless because there's never any reason to change persistent effects, and hell, if the difference between DA2 and BG2 passivity is fighters have no abilities and every class in DA2 has 10 persistent effects that are passive abilites you merely flip on or off at a whim, then they have not fixed the passivity issue). 

 

It's also worth noting that BG/BG2 have more potential party make-ups than DA/DA2. So even at the party level, BG/BG2 is significantly more complex.

Edited August 29, 2013 by anubite

[alanschu]

Games derived from the Team Fortress model beat it out rather handily. Whether that be Team Fortress itself or Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. If you break out of the Call of Duty and Halo spheres you'll find lots of that. Natural Selection has lots of playstyles. And these games actually have movement abilities, not just variations on attacks. With environments that make use of it.

 

Although it's twisted in with an RPG and story, so in that sense it's still a bit unique.

 

My ultimate sad panda moment is when I felt Alpha Protocol played a lot like Mass Effect, but got ripped to shreds because of it

 

 

EDIT:  Anyways, off to PAX!

 

Have a good weekend guys

Edited August 29, 2013 by alanschu

[Orogun01]

 

Mass Effect happens 170 years in the future. Why would their guns have the same level of accuracy as a modern firearm?

 

 

ME1 guns all had recoil, so be they future guns or not, they worked on the same principle. ME1 had a more complex gameplay design, which was fun to a lot of people including me, ME2/3 stream lined all that out and what you got was a generic shooter. It's basically the same thing people complained about in DA:O, that it was nowhere near as complex as BG.

 

They were railguns that worked on the mass effect principles, technically they shouldn't have had recoil. Still I enjoyed the system as it was, it lent itself to a futuristic feeling because guns didn't work the same way.

[Sarex]

They were railguns that worked on the mass effect principles, technically they shouldn't have had recoil. Still I enjoyed the system as it was, it lent itself to a futuristic feeling because guns didn't work the same way.

 

But they did, and personally I never had a problem with accuracy. The highlight of ME1 for me was when I could get off 3 Explosive bullets at a time near the end game, that was so op. XD

[Volourn]

"Let's compare BG2 DAO and DA2, just on the PC level:

 

Human

Elf

Helf

Gnome
Halfing

Dwarf

HOrc

 

Fighter

Ranger

Paladin

Barbarian

Cleric

Druid

Mage

Sorcerer

Thief

Bard

Monk

 

3 kits per class on avg

 

3 moralities at least (some classes can have any one of the 9 alignments, but a lot of classes are restricted)

 

races * classes * kits 

7 * 11 * 3 * 3= 693

 

If you're a mage, you have your starting spells, which add complexity, but not all that much, so we'll just ignore it. But every single one of those starting character choices matters. Your starting alignment effects your Bhaal spells and other ****, class kits are influential, as is your race and class. I'm not even going to add in complexity by counting the number of ways you can arrange your starting attributes.

 

DAO:

 

Race: 3

Class: 3

Origin: 5*

 

*Not really five, every race->class choice limits you to as few as one origins (mages have one origin, most other have between 2 to 3). If I'm generous, I'll say 3 chocies for every class combination

 

3*3*3 = 27

 

DA2 starting complexity?

 

3

 

 

So, again, let's compare:

 

693

27

3

 

Numbers don't lie. Now, you might be tempted to say, "But waait a minute! Warriors and rogues have active/spam abilities in DAO/DA2, and what about leveling up in general? Those games might be more complex after level 1!"

 

If you really don't believe me, I can do the combinatorics to show BG2 > DA:O > DA2 in terms of end-game character complexity. I haven't done the math, but I think BG is also > DA:O and DA2 in terms of end-game complexity.

 

If we talk strictly in terms of possible combinations, builds, etc BG/BG2 are more complex in character creation and advancement and offer strictly more options for players. Many of these options aren't illusory (while I would go so far as to say many of DA2's talent trees offer illusory choices or offer zero impact at level up, one example that comes to mind is Varric's talent tree, where you have a choice between 3 persistent abilities that you cannot have all active at once, yet you must purchase all of them to get the final talent - two of those points at least are worthless because there's never any reason to change persistent effects, and hell, if the difference between DA2 and BG2 passivity is fighters have no abilities and every class in DA2 has 10 persistent effects that are passive abilites you merely flip on or off at a whim, then they have not fixed the passivity issue). 

 

It's also worth noting that BG/BG2 have more potential party make-ups than DA/DA2. So even at the party level, BG/BG2 is significantly more complex."
 

All this, and it's all meaningless garbage. Why waste your time if you aren't gonna post logically?

[NOK222]

anubite, don't take the bait, just breathe and walk away. 

[Volourn]

The only one baiting is anubite. The guy spams BIo threads and plays BIO games despite how 'horrible' they are. i thoUGht he was done with the DA series after DA2 but then he replayed DA2 and posted a rereview of it just to try to convince people how much  hecks then he claimed he was finished with all things DA ANd BIO yet here he is ... spamming the next DA game thread about, you guessed it, how much it is gonna suck. yet, everyone know he will play it. In fact, he likely has  his credit card at the ready to preorder it. LMAO

Edited August 30, 2013 by Volourn

[aluminiumtrioxid]

It doesn't change the fact that you deserve to be mocked and ridiculed if you still think BG2 was less complex than DA2.

[Maria Caliban]

 

“Through a breach in the sky, the brave now walk where once we feared to dream.”

 

Speculation is that this might mean we're allowed to travel to the Black City or the 'afterlife.'

[Volourn]

"It doesn't change the fact that you deserve to be mocked and ridiculed if you still think BG2 was less complex than DA2."

 

The ones who need to be mocked are the ones who think BG2 is more complex because it has halfings. LMAO