Dragon Age: Inquisition

Nothing that actually matters is real-time. All the things that unlock parts of areas or new zones or whatever finish instantly. The rest of it’s just a bit of intermittent story drip with very minor rewards. I mainly wish you could interact with it outside of the home base, because it was a pain to go back to deal with that stuff. Especially before they fixed the loading times.

ProTip: It uses your computer’s clock. So just set your clock ahead, and missions will immediately complete.

That is not entirely true. most have at least 15 minute clocks on them. Towards the end of the game you are told to go to the war room to do something and if you have the people in the war room doing other stuff you have to wait for one of them to be freed up before you can do the task. Also I found that a couple times I had to leave and return for tasks to show up on the map.

But yea, having to return to the war room for some simple direction was a pain in the ass.

I cannot recall a single war table thing that made an impact on the game world that had a timer or used the actual named characters who could be busy. You just spent power and chose an approach.

You needed to go to the war room to open areas, and in order to do that you would have to have either Cullen, Leilani or Josephine do something. Usually the important things were either 15 minutes (find where Samson was hiding) or instantaneous (such as going to the Western Wastes).

Some very optional ones were 3 hours long.

This leads me to a question, if you don’t defeat Samson does he show up at the end of the game or does Corephius (sp) somehow benefit?

It’s absolutely optional, but when I’m playing a game I want to do the optional stuff too, and time-gating a single-player game is, if you’ll excuse my language, fucking stupid.

You can’t not defeat the lieutenant, it’s on the main quest. You either knock them out or (if you sided with Templars) you can convince the mage that the bad guy was going to double-cross her and she leaves. If you knock them out they come back to your keep for judgment, and the various options there have minor impact on the game.

I think @Scuzz may be right that the important stuff was not time-gated, though IIRC, you still needed an available advisor to do the task, which you might not have in all circumstances. Either way, it was and still is an absolutely inexcusable mechanism, IMO.

And I know one could tamper with the clock, but that hardly makes it better. I shouldn’t have to do that sort of stuff, to enjoy a game or see all of its content.

Scuzz was the one claiming they were time-gated, and that is simply not true. If it changes the main game world in any way, it’s an instant expenditure of power and you do not require an advisor. The timers and advisor locks are all 100% internal to the war table and 100% a sideline to the core gameplay. Seriously. I just looked through a wiki list of all of the war table quests.

Now, I get not liking the war table, but…I’m not sure what the alternative is supposed to be? If you eliminate all timers, you’re literally just clicking short text paragraphs until the questline runs out. There’s no actual meat there, so if it’s not something to poke at occasionally between actual adventuring it seems even more pointless than it already is. And sure, I suppose you could just get rid of it entirely, but the point is to make you feel like the leader of an organization, with underlings to do things for you. I think it works quite well for that. And if you don’t want to mess with that shit, it’s 100% siloed so you don’t have to.

It is, of course, time-gated. It’s just optional, but that doesn’t make it OK.

I would gate missions to quest completion. You finish the quest to kill a bugbear, up pops a bugbear-related mission.

They do some of that already. But if you’re just clicking to complete, what’s the point of having it at all?

Well, some of the missions had little stories, they were vaguely and briefly interesting. I would be fine with taking it out entirely too, but gating them by quests and making them instant would be better than that.

I agree that the stories could be interesting, I just think having them tick down while you’re out adventuring is the only reason to have a war table. Otherwise they might as well be codex entries.

I recall really liking dragon fights, some crafting moments, and the expansions (trespasser).

That is after I got into to the game.

I don’t recall hating the board, It was there – I did it. I liked some of the open world bits. That giant and dragon fighting on the shore.

Looking back on things I’d say the think I disliked the MOST about DA:I was struggling with the interface. The mouse/kb was sorta awkward. When I finally got a controller THAT was awkward, But if you go back to Dragon Age: origins – it seems natural.

Apologies if I misrepresented anyone’s comments.

Sure, one can play the game (almost) without the war table, but that would mean missing out on useful items/schematics, a whole lot of approval, as well as quite a lot of lore, dangling storylines, and a number of missions/events. I just don’t see this as being something that is “optional” in the game at all.

I also don’t think you really need timers for this. Timers are just an alternate form of resource-gating, after all - they could have built an equivalent system using alternate resources to gate the content if they wanted to, after all (they already use fame - they could have easily added a couple more instead of the timers).

That being said, I would have been fine without the war table in the game at all. Although I didn’t mind the version they used in the Descent DLC, where the “expedition table” was mostly used to uncover new areas (building bridges, etc). Crucially, that version had no quest/story-relevant timers at all.

I know the story line involving Samson has perhaps 8-9 parts, and some of that does require you to go to the War Room and wait 15 minutes while something is done. Parts of the quest (Before the Dawn) are given by Cullen but in order to find out locations you need the war room and at least 2 15 minute “searches”. I just did that part less than 3 days ago.

I believe the major locations (Western Wastes etc) are available instantly with the use of 5-40 power.

I tried playing using a controller and gave up, going back to the mouse. My big problem with that was during a battle you loose track of the mouse (you can vary the size of the mouse tracker but I never did that) and the next thing I knew I had clicked some lower button by accident.

The dragons were fun fights, but once you understood the dragons limitations they weren’t very hard.

Okay, you’re right, there are a couple of companion quests with associated war table operation requirements. Only a couple, mind you.

Hope that’s good news for the direction of ubigames. Sounds like it…

Considering the last two Creed games have gone more into RPG like territory that’s not a surprising hire.