A lot of those are Requisitions - they are not sidequests, just a way to gain … what were they called… influence points? They are infinite, so they just keep generating in every area.
What made me rage (a bit of a strong word actually) was the combat. It seemed very arcadey, and hard to control. I wanted/expected a similar combat system to the preceding games. Instead I got some sort of light show requiring many clicks.
Then the game hung on me, asked me to go somewhere, by clicking a doorway or something, but it wouldn’t work, so I was aimlessly wandering around the start area because the game bugged out.
It’s a fine game, but nowhere near my top 10 CRPGs. The MMO open-world stuff is terrible, the time-gated missions are ridiculous, and it makes you click the search button every 10 seconds for the entire length of the game.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still enjoying my playthrough, going through the Jaws of Hakkon DLC now. But it’s nowhere remotely approaching the greatness that was DA:Origins.
I agree. Especially with regards to Origins. That game was brilliant and they should have expanded more on it than doing whatever the hell DA2 was.
@kristina please do yourself a favor and play DA: Origins. I preferred the combat in Origins, but maybe that aspect won’t be as good for you. But, it has great characters - some who are in Inquisition (Morrigan and Lelianna). Morrigan is one of my favorite game characters of all time.
Holy shit, Morrigan and Lelianna are in Inquisition? Ok, now I have to play it.
Oh yeah, Lelianna is a major character, and Morrigan comes in maybe halfway through. All your choices in Origin transfer too, including the consequences of your very last one.
Same here, and I restarted the entire game and it did it again. So I gave up on it.
Just to give you a heads up, in case it matters, but they aren’t party members/playable.
I literally just met Morrigan at that empress party. I hope I am more than halfway through given that I already played 90 hours.
That’s cool. Both their stories felt incomplete, so I just wanted to know what the next chapter in their stories brought about.
I played through Origins multiple times to try out various race origins, etc, but still haven’t finished Inquisition. I suppose I should just power through the main quests and avoid a lot of the side crap, just to finish it.
The combat bugs me (especially as it feels these massive displays of magic I’m performing are barely doing any real damage), the meaningless side quests bug me, all the random crap to collect in the landscape that I’ll never use but still have to pick up, etc. All that crap distracts me from could very well be a great overall plot and more character development.
It depends how much non-critical path stuff you did before the Winter Palace. You could be anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 done.
I may be one of the few people that really enjoyed DA2 and SarcasticHawke’s voice performance.
I liked DA2 better than Origins, personally. For one thing, the first game had no Varric.
A lack of Varric is a problem, but Origins also doesn’t have the rushed design, repeating levels and ridiculous potemkin village of a city.
The Dragon Age series is kind of funny in that if you gave me the elevator pitch of each game and how much it appeals to me, I’d rank them DA2, Inquisition, Origins. When you add in execution though, that ranking gets entirely reversed.
I loved Dragon Age 2, I think it might be the secret best Bioware game. I don’t personally feel Dragon Age: Origins holds up, it’s not awful but I do not love it. Dragon Age: Inquisition was pretty good for a while, I didn’t have problems with it that people mentioned up thread, but I do think it’s way too long and the combat system gets a bid tedious. Inquisition is the only Dragon Age game I’ve not finished.
Plus the combat in Origins is varied and tactically rewarding, also often challenging. The combat in 2 is a repetitive slog made worse by immersion-breaking reinforcement waves in every fucking encounter. Inquisition’s combat is still lacking, but at least the enemies you see on the map are usually what you get, and the main exception (rifts) are fictional justified and the second wave is different and stronger.
I had a bug in Origins where I tried to break it off with Leiliana and it never took. So every time we were back at camp, I had to break up with her again, especially if she saw me smooching someone else. She more or less turned into the guy from Memento.
Made everything super awkward, but I just wrapped head fiction around it to make it a fun part of my personal story.
I chalk that up to rushed design, but yeah. There’s this conversation between Merrill and Varric about how everyone’s always talking about how unsafe the slums are but it all seems perfectly safe to her, and Varric’s reply is that that safety is costing him a fortune. He’s paying the gangs to not touch her.
And you can get this conversation between being assaulted by waves of gangs, accompanied by the one the gangs are being paid off to lay off, the man who’s paying them, and if Aveline is in the party, the captain of the fricking guard. This is what the term ludo-narrative dissonance was invented for.
It’s so frustrating because I like the caracters a ton*, I love everything about the Qunari, but it’s all for naught because EA wanted a quick cash-in and made Bioware churn out a sequel in a year. If they’d had another year to iterate, Kirkwall could’ve been a believable place, combat encounters could’ve been more varied, the central Mage-Templar conflict could’ve had more than a fraction of the nuance of the Mage Tower sequence in Origins, and maybe there wouldn’t have been that garbage fire of an ending. It could’ve been a classic instead of an interesting first draft.
*Anders can go die in a fire though. The Warden-commander takes him to her bosom and this is how he repays her? Also, the line about the Wardens forcing him to give up Ser pounce-a-lot was plainly a cover for his neglect killing the poor kitty. The mass-murdering dickwad.