Sure, but we were talking about real time, not in-game time. Dragon Age: Inquisitions has missions that take an hour of real time to complete.
This is obviously an artificial time gate, like you see in facebook type social games. But they have a reason to exist; users can pay money to skip the timer. DA:I is a single-player game without microtransactions, monetized by the initial purchase, so there’s no reason for thess time gates to exist. They’re just annoying.
If you put missions in the game with zero cost and don’t want players to keep pumping them out, destroying the economy, rather than making the player wait an hour for missions to finish, better to set them to instantly complete but constrain reward volumes by not spawning new missions until the player goes out and completes some quests. This isn’t brilliant game design, it’s an obvious solution to the problem. So why didn’t they do it?
My guess is EA did plan to sell “energy” microtransactions to immediately complete these time gated missions, but then wussed out. Remember this was 2014 EA, not Star Wars Battlefield 2 EA.
The open world in DA:I is boring and terrible, as was the open world in Mass Effects where you drove around a boring terrible moonscape for awhile. From what I’ve reads, the open world in Mass Effect: Andromeda is also boring and terrible. EA doesn’t make great open worlds, they’re far worse at it than Ubisoft and nowhere near the frontrunners like Rockstar and the guys that make the Witcher.
You have fun in DA:I in spite of the open world, not because of it.
OK, so you meant “poisoned by a crap open world”. Which I didn’t find to be the case in Andromeda at all, but mine is the minority opinion there. Have to get back to you about Inquisition when I finally play it. If I do, I should probably say.
The open world in ME: Andromeda is really good on most of the planets I played. Eos was really good, but the snow planet, I forget its name, was stellar. The jungle planet open world I didn’t like very much.
I haven’t played ME:A yet so I don’t have an opinion, but its open-world stuff was poorly reviewed upon release.
Much more so than DA:I, where most of the problem was the first very large boring area (the Hinterlands) where players stuck around for hours doing quests where you returned lost buffalo to farmers, killed rams to collect 10 pieces of mutton, crap like that.
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.
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?
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.
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.
