Dragon Age: Inquisition

yeah MEA wasn’t really open world. same ol’ gated bioware planets/zones.

I think the actual design intent behind that is that you are being actively encouraged by the timers to a) journey out into the world while that time passes instead of just micromanaging your table, and b) preferably be forced to actually switch up your party from time to time due to War Table commitments. Also, since they actually put some real content into that thing (gated, but real), they needed to make sure you couldn’t just blow through everything at once, then have to wait for more to unlock via external progression.

I can understand why they’d want to do that. You design a bunch of characters, and you don’t want players committing to a limited subset because that’s who they like, and that’s all they want to play, and you make all this content and you need to find a contextual way to gate progress on it so people don’t just min\max blow through it then say “This sucks” when there’s nothing on the War Table until you complete some arbitrarily gating mission in the narrative.

I’m not saying it was a good idea, but I get it.

Nobody in your active party has any role on the War Table.

Personally I don’t get why the timer is a big deal. Anything that actually gates main game content finishes instantly, the rest is just something to toss on the burner while you go play the real game. I did find having to go back to the castle annoying, though, mostly because the load times used to be absolutely egregious.

Oh shit, that’s right. I forgot you sent out your other Inquisition folks. Well, the remainder of the argument applies, but the intent behind is even more goofy now. I didn’t hate the timer, ever, but I always thought it a bit weird. I didn’t mind the subtle reminders to head out, but since I usually War Table’d first, by the time I did the rest of my base management, the short timers were expiring, so I’d head back over and reassign before heading out. I think they always meant for it to be the last thing you did, since it’s also where you picked where to go, right? But I wanted those juicy rewards when I got back to the castle.

Jokes aside, the timer does something really important: it stops you gorging on what is essentially a side dish to the main course. I like that the war table says, “No, no, this isn’t the meat of the game - go off on an adventure and I’ll have some little bits of theme and story for you when you’re back”. Handed out piecemeal in this way, it’s a pleasant distraction. Were I allowed to just sit and click on ‘all the things’ every time I went to the war table it would be a frustrating piece of busywork.

And that’s also really important for the war table to convey that you’re running a big complicated organisation where things happen while you’re away, not just when you’re around.

I suppose they could have added a ‘sleep for X days’ option in your bedroom to let you skip time. But that’s dull as anything. Wouldn’t you rather be adventuring to pass the time?

Shit. It WAS Soren Johnson: https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=560

I liked the timed war table stuff too. I absolutely hate it in a mobile game because it’s only in the mobile game to be annoying so you are encouraged to pay to skip it. But in DA it’s fine, it’s just something you check in on whenever you happen to be back doing stuff at your big castle. It’s not stopping me from playing the actual game and it does give a sense of things happening in the background.

The thing with War Table and the galaxy map war effort, I was there was a better way to clue in the player ahead of time on how you could affect outcomes.

Dont forget the loot mule!

The dog in Torchlight was great.

Yeah, lots of innovation in the OG Dungeon Siege. Partial potions, too. Nobody listened and now here I am in 2018 deleting items to free inventory space.

Sending pets back to sell your crap works too, if a bit less elegant than a transmute phat lewt to gold spell.

I still think the Bard’s Tale ARPG from a few years back did it best - of the loot is lower quality than you’re carrying, or it’s just random crap, it just turns into gold when you touch it.

I’m fine doing that for vendor trash, but think it may be a step too far towards convenience on usable items.

Why though? A +5 long sword is quantitatively better than a +4 longsword.

You can have like 10 NPC companions and all can be respecced at any time. So you might want to turn Cassandra into a 2H wielder, but the game already autosold all the 2Handers that dropped because Iron Bull already had a better one.

Respec’ing is wishy washy. Pick a build and stick with it, I say.

65 hours later…

So, this game is an OCD resistence training tool. The good thing is, it broke my OCD!

I did all the quests, even all the meaningless ones (which is pretty much all of them), rifts, all that…

But then I got to Hissing Wastes. Wow. That place was so utterly boring that it finally broke me and I said fuck it and now I will just beeline it to the companion and main quests. Yay!

It is weird how I can see so much work and effort in this game, but the quest design is so incredibly poor. And the lack of music then kills the atmosphere. What a shame.

I do enjoy most of the dialogue, NPC companions, the graphics…so I will finish it for sure.

Yep that is where I tapped out also, never finished the main quest I was so demoralized.

Huh. Me as well.

All the MMO/open-world crap is terrible in this game. But the main quest and many of the companion quests are just plain excellent. The Winter Palace is particularly spectacular, although I could do without the timed bits.