Anyone else play the multiplayer in this game? My friend and I got into the multiplayer in a big way this weekend.
I looked at all the shops and didn’t see anything special.
I am also kind of stuck (I put this game down to play Pillars). I was in the winter palace, and after doing some stuff I met with my advisors and then I needed to get some blackmail info on two people in the royal wing. For the life of me, I can’t find the royal wing. I spent an hour running around everywhere I had already been and can’t find any doors I missed. Ill get back to it when i am done with PoE, but if I can’t find the entrance, Ill just give up.
Have any patches/mods alleviated the crappy combat view and allowed for a greater zoom-out? I ditched the game in the first act as it was too frustrating, but I’d like to play more if this annoyance is ever tamed.
I finally beat this over the weekend. The biggest bummer about crafting is that I made gear that was superior to all the purples that dropped off the Dragons. Every character had a weapon and armor that was better than the best epics in the game by a huge margin. The final boss battle was trivially easy because of this, and I played on Hard. Maybe I should have played Nightmare.
The infinite zoom hack in this used to work, but apparently not for the current patch level.
http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtopic.php?p=5566220
It was awesome when I played through back in December.
So, nobody then.
So, how does MP work in this game? Is it full coop (i.e. the full singleplayer campaign) or is it more ‘free roaming’ encounters and whatnot with no ‘purpose’?
Now that everyone is playig PoE, I’m trying DA:I! Always with the novelties!
For now, more than a good game, it seems a “compulsive” game. Huge expanse to explore, lots of sites to reclaim, loot to take, collectable to collect, doodads to activate, resources to pick, weapons and upgrades to craft, places to visit, sidequests to complete, things to kill, etc etc. It’s all busywork openworld a bit in the style of Ubisoft game, but the mix makes it addictive, a game to play with the game half-sleep, but then notice you have played for two hours without noticing.
But I also am one of the people who said Diablo wasn’t good, it was just addictive, and in fact never finished any of the Diablo games, let’s see with if I get bored after x days here.
In fact that’s that was the good part of the game. The rest? Eh…
The plot for now is lazy and derivative as hell. The reopening of the Inquisition and the claims you are Andraste’s Herald are rushed in the story, it didn’t feel properly paced or even important. The last point is a interesting point to develop in a videogame, but right now it hasn’t be handled especially with care.
The companions are decent but they seem a bit below the average Bioware companion. We’ll see later.
The controls are bad, the combat is bad, the filler sidequests/activities are bad. I have the impression that all these (important for a rpg!) flaws are somewhat concious design choices because they have tried to appeal to MMO players. In fact the control scheme, the static combat with guided shots and the stupid sidequests happen to remember some MMOs…
Argh, don’t mention the U word after I just emerged from Far Cry 4 unsure where my 25 hours went.
I always say I only enjoy that stuff when I enjoy the basic gameplay/combat. Maybe it will be a pleasant surprise like DA2 but I’m not getting my hopes up.
I agree with what you have said TuringTur. The combat really is very boring. I also do not like the maze like layout of the various areas. It all gets very tiresome. My feelings on the game so far are very ‘meh’. I feel more like I am killing time play DA:I rather than having fun.
If I recall, the entire opening sequence was added after the fact because the game’s opening was confusing. I think originally they just had you starting as the Inquisition.
Agreed on the combat, it’s not great. They wanted to support the multiplayer, which is nice I suppose. I tried to play with friendly fire on, like I did in the first game, but the companion AI ensures that you’ll be killing yourselves more than the enemies 99% of the time. Add on that there are very few single target abilities in the game, even the melee attacks hit multiple enemies. I made a 2 handed warrior who couldn’t fight next to Cassandra because I’d kill her with my weapon’s AoE.
Jeez, exempting melee AoE from friendly fire is pretty fundamental, isn’t it?
I’ve tried it and dislike it, mainly because I think having played my share of mmos it doesn’t measure up to group co-op content in any mmo I’ve played.
Kind of like an MMO dungeon encounter. It reminds me a lot of the horde-mode style multiplayer in Mass Effect 3, which I really liked. Level up characters, unlock new classes, get crates with equipment in them to equip your guys with.
I had a blast playing this with friends online this weekend. The combat feels really good in the multiplayer, at least as an archer, which I was.
Looks like NVIDIA released a new driver hotfix that fixes crashes in the Frostbite engine. Good news for me, if I decide to dive back into DA:I after my big first game (but I’m busy with PoE now).
Good. I had to downgrade my driver to stop the crashes.
A bit more than 17 hours played, so I will post a few more comments
-Holy shit this game is going to kill my gpu. I limited the framerate to just 40fps, instead of being bordering on 60fps, but even then after one hour I can hear my gpu going at maximum rpm. Hell, I think my neighbor should be able of hear it.
And this game has some of the longest loading times I’ve seen since I’ve put a SSD a few years ago. Big scenarios, but there is a price to pay for it.
-Technically, it looks great thanks to very good engine with PBR (physically based rendering) with great lightning and material rendering (skin or example), high resolution textures and hdr and effects in general (god rays, fog, spells, etc). Artistically, I think it’s more of a mixed bag. Some environments looks great, especially thanks to the lightning settings, the environmental effects like rain and fog, but the design itself of some parts are all over the place, with some interesting parts together some run of the mill fantasy designs. Characters look iffy, I like a handful of party characters, and all outside of that look mediocre, or just boring.
Overall I think it’s more a game spectacular thanks to the engine than to the artists work.
-The game improves after the Hinterlands, yeah. People were right about it.
-Dragon’s Age lore is… competent, but uninteresting. I admit it’s decently developed, but I find myself tuning it out lots of times. And it’s so lazy to put most of it in scrolls/books/notes you find, I think in general developers should try harder to embed their lore in the game itself, in the places, in the people, in the situations they put in the game.
A few parts like what I heard about the Tervinter Empire was pretty cool. Maybe make next game there?
Part of the problem is that you don’t get to experience the setting in a normal way, the world is always about to blow up, you are always the chosen hero in abnormal circumstances, all is overrun by monsters, etc.
-Main story is for now a mystery, but it all points out to same old, with a big baddie, a plan to dominate the world/get unlimited power, and a savior stopping him. Bleh.
-The best part, as always, are the conversations with the party members, digging in the dialog options, which shows a more complex and interesting world, backstory and character building. In fact I still wonder how they do it, how they can be good in that but bad in the rest.
I think their fundamental flaw is being good writers on paper (like, literally writing about a character or a city on paper), but they don’t know how to apply said writing in a real video game, in a setting you can experience, see it as a living world, that you can interact with, etc. Like, the old “show, don’t tell”. But they are good telling, not showing.
I just had a super cool conversation with Dorian about a great number of things, and he painted a world full of grey, with light and shadows and different points of view and a very humanistic perspective. But once I finish the conversation with him and play the game, it’s all about “the Herald of Andraste!” "you are the leader of the Inquisition, you will save the world! “this guy is evil, grrr!” “a fanatic sect trying to do nefarious things” “the Chantry is blind and oppose you” “this leader is trying to seize power for himself!” etc. I’m exaggerating but you get the point.
-I remember some discussion about side quests when the game was released. I think some people thought they weren’t so bad because they, the filler content is optional, you can skip the parts you don’t like. I think the argument is bullshit, because even if it’s optional, it’s part of the content of the game. And not only that, we aren’t talking about something like 1/5 of the game. It’s more the other way around, 4/5 of the game (basically everything except the main quest) consists of some of the laziest side quests I’ve seen in my life, full of repetitive tasks, poor or non-existing dialog, weak premises, collecta-thons, etc.
-A little example, the requisition quests aren’t only bland as hell, usually picking minerals and other materials, but their reward is a very abstract “+1 power” each. I think it would have been much better if your army and stronghold would have real needs and it gain concrete, related bonuses if you supply them.
-Oh god, checking out stuff at the shop. Buying and selling. Comparing items of different members of the party. Crafting and upgrading. It’s all so bad. I need ages to check out all the options every time I do a pair of hours of adventuring and my inventory is full again.
Funny you should say that, I haven’t played DA:I yet, but I was just thinking about the DA:O lore in relation to Pillars of Eternity, the lore of which I like much better than the DA lore. And part of the reason why is that it’s introduced partly via books, of course - but also, definitely, as part of the history that the in-game characters know about and tell you about from their perspective (i.e. the bits of it they’ve lived through themselves) in their conversations. So it makes the books more interesting - you kind of want to read them to fill in the gaps in the lore that you’re learning through interactions with the NPCs.
But maybe that’s just a function of the costs/benefits of having a more tightly scripted story versus a more sprawling sandbox. When it’s tighter, the story can be gated to you in the course of character interaction.
I find Dragon Age Inquisition’s lore really fantastic in this game. The first game I found it really dry with its attempt at a darker, edgier D&D/forgotten realms and an attempt at making the fantasy tropes different (accentless dwarves etc.) but I really enjoyed what little there was in DA2. DAI increased this enjoyment for me when they introduced subtly different and subverted the take of the original gods and creation myths.
Just got this, first toe-dip. My immediate reaction is that the graphics on Ultra are amazing, especially the faces in the conversations. I mean, skin, eyes, etc., are very close to photorealism now.
And yet the uncanny valley effect is just as strong, and it struck me that there are two reasons for this: hinky animations and body structures.
I mean, how much longer are we going to have to put up with weird, dislocated shoulders and jerky puppetry in videogames? It’s going to be the new frontier to refine those areas.
Been reading a bit about this new “bullet” physics, whereby you’ll be able to get things like cloth automatically not clipping and stuff like that. Perhaps also body parts that have physics to them, so the body can be modelled a tad more realistically and react to itself?
And for the face and body animations, perhaps more motion capturing of actors doing their performances in a virtual environment (that they can see)?