| Title | If you played Dragon Age: Inquisition, you may have spoiled the next Mass Effect |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | News |
| When | April 20, 2015 |
We all know another Mass Effect game is coming..
Read the full articleIf it's anything like DA:I I don't think I'll have words for my disappointment. What a boring mess that game was, despite the nice touches between characters.
Inquisition was fantastic. Feel free to skip on Mass Effect, though, the rest of us will likely be quite happy to tell you about it.
We knew it was going to use the same engine, that it would follow a similar gameplay formula is not particularly surprising. Maybe it will work better for Mass Effect, a series where they've long been trying and failing to offer a sense of a wide galaxy full of planets to explore, than it did for Dragon Age.
I would really rather Bioware get back to their core competency, though. Inquisition's attempt at open-worlding things feels like a bowl filled brimful of unsalted busywork in which occasional slivers of narrative and character liven things up for a few moments, and somewhere, floating in the depths, there's some actual delicious story. Ditch the "open world" and you'd lose some beautiful scenery and about 90 hours of gameplay, but you'd have a vastly superior overall experience.
Completely avoidable, then.
At this point, EA's games aren't even worthy enough to pirate, others have far better versions of whatever they do.
Where did that picture come from?
Also, sidestepping the repercussions of Mass Effect 3 by following it up with Mass Effect: Gaiden is laaaaame.
This seems suspiciously DA:I-esque.
Honestly they should've just made a different sci fi setting (instead of Mass Effect: Now With a Different Implacable Ancient Threat), but I guess that wouldn't sell as well.
The concept art image came from BioWare. It was one of the things they released for N7 day last year. http://blog.bioware.com/2014/1...
Jeez, what a bunch of wet blankets! This sounds pretty awesome to me, getting back to more exploration like in the original game! Of course, I never played DA:I so I don't get the unflattering comparisons, but it still sounds good to me. More Mako! More Moon Patrol buggy!
For what it is worth I am sure it could be fun. Plus I just like the basic concept of an exploration RPG, and hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and gradually get better and better at it, and others would learn from it as well. It can only be good in net effect as far I'm concerned, even if the journey is bound to be frustrating at times.
Sounds good to me I loved DA:I, great characters, great world and lots of replay value. Sure it had more collecting then expected but it delivered an enjoyable experience overall that was just as memorable as their past games.
Bioware's core competency is no longer at the company really, most of the designers and actual producers who made games like BG and BG2/NWN/DA:O no longer work for the company. So fetch quests padding and press X for awesome to happen is what one should expect from them at this point, since those designers pushing for more "action" combat unfortunately stayed after the acquisition.
It has less to do with being open world or not, the talent pool remaining at Edmonton and Austin is just simply on a lower tier of competency.
Well if there's one thing I am gathering from all this, apparently I need to reassess my decision to skip DA:I.
While I'll buy that the best talent at Bioware has departed, the parts of Dragon Age Inquisition that are actually plot-relevant and/or character centric are still heads and shoulders above the open world sidequesting. They may never recapture past glories (I think Obsidian's been better at everything from the start, anyway), but if they could stick to that stuff they'd have a game I could still unreservedly recommend.
Just do as little sidequesting as possible. Or all of it, if you for some reason enjoyed the barren makework of Mass Effect's "planet exploration" content, because as boring and drudgery intensive as Inqusition's version is, it's still more rewarding than that shit was.
(I say as someone who did all of it because I have a sickness.)
DA:I is a game where I had to go through boring shit to get to the interactive dialogue. Like an MMO trapped in a single player experience, the gameplay constantly dragged into a repetitive hording collection game with moments of button smash and... ooh Granite x3!
Sorry what I meant to say was that it never felt like combat mattered just stalled me to getting to the... Lotus berries! I found rare lotus berries! What was I saying?
I'll second Barac that the dialog, characters, and major quests (like Wicked Eyes, Wicked Hearts, or the character quests like Cassandra's literature or meeting Bianca) were fantastic.
If they trimmed 60 hours out of the MMO-style "harvest 117 materials" and "collect 23 bafomdads", it would have been a really terrific game overall.
Yes, I get that you're sad they're not making BG3 and designing it exactly like BG2, but there isn't actually a problem with the *quality* of Bioware's output.
It strikes me as rather the opposite of lame... We don't need "Adventures of Shepard 4: Shepard Harder", especially if they would have to just throw out most of the possible endings and pick one as canon.
Followed by fan-servicey "oh look, it's Garrus! Hey Tali is back!"
I think they created a lovely fictional universe there, and exploring that universe further without the baggage of the existing characters and choices and plotline is pretty much the best possible outcome.
Much like I enjoyed KOTOR. It manages to be "Star Wars" without having to stop every five minutes to be like "OMG it's Han Solo, haha remember when they blew up the Death Star? lol good times..."
If you like the characters and dialog from DA:O and Mass Effect, DA:I delivers that element beautifully.
The new engine is generally great - beautiful graphics if you care about that, but even if you don't it's nice to be able to roam the whole area without load screens. Seriously imagine playing a Mass Effect games and only having a load screen when you land on a new planet.
The big quests, the main plot ones and the character quests (like loyalty missions from ME2) are quite good.
It just has a huge volume of MMO-style filler quests and "collect X thingys", which can suck the life out of any excitement you were building up on the other stuff. In theory it's all optional (for the love of all that is holy, you must force yourself to leave the Hinterlands without hundred-percenting it first), but in practice most RPG players (including myself) like to complete all side quests and craft the best gear and whatnot.